In the wake of multiple global shocks, the financial landscape remains both highly uncertain and critical to lasting responses. As countries grapple with the impacts of the compounding crises, World Bank is facing a significant increase in requested interventions in the financial sector.
Against this background, the F4D Umbrella Program is uniquely positioned to respond to the country demand, leveraging the World Bank’s lending for greater impact, and deploying considerable expertise and knowledge on a broad list of thematic areas.
Alignment with the World Bank’s Playbook for Development
F4D places a strong focus on the topics of women and youth, climate change, digitalization and private capital-enabling reforms, in line with the World Bank’s new vision and playbook for development.
Ecosystem Approach to Financial Sector Development
The Umbrella Program enables a unique ecosystem approach to financial sector reforms, combining the work on financial stability, integrity, inclusion, financing real economy, capital markets, and cross-cutting themes like digital finance, gender finance, greening of the financial sector and financing green.
Increased Impact at Global, Country- and Regional Levels
F4D’s global, country-level, and regional grants address the most pressing client needs with multi-year, multi-pillar programmatic engagements. By complementing IBRD and IDA financial resources with global thought leadership, technical assistance, capacity building, policy advice, and partnerships activities, F4D is instrumental in supporting the World Bank’s scaling-up efforts in the financial sector, particularly in fragile and conflict-affected countries. In parallel, F4D remains a critical platform to shape the global discussion on financial sector issues, through a development lens, and nurture strategic partnerships.
Leveraging Lending and Maximizing Value for Money
Importantly, F4D influences, through knowledge and technical assistance, the design and implementation of large-scale lending operations, financed by the World Bank. This maximizes the value for money for our donors and amplifies development impact. In FY23, active portfolio grants were informing US$1.5 billion in World Bank lending. Even in its inception year, F4D rapidly adapted to meet the evolving needs and served as a launchpad for strategic support to countries, while leveraging World Bank financial instruments. This demonstrates significant value for money for F4D donor financing and an important role that F4D-funded activities play in enhancing the impact of large-scale financial sector investments and achieving measurable results on the ground.
Strong Focus on Results
F4D focuses on outcomes, reflecting the advantage of pooling funds together to deliver results at scale. F4D’s rigorous M&E Framework articulates the program’s results-based management approach. Measuring success and reporting on the results to our external stakeholders is critical to the learning process and accountability of the F4D program.
Sharp Focus on Knowledge Sharing and Learning
Internal and external partnerships are pivotal to success of F4D, evolving beyond a financing mechanism into a knowledge and partnership platform. F4D prioritizes systematic knowledge sharing, both internally and externally, to increase operational impact and foster collaborative approaches within the World Bank and with partners.
A dedicated F4D Knowledge and Learning framework serves as a mechanism to inform the decision-making to prioritize thematic areas, funding, and future programming of F4D, maximizing value for money for our donors and strengthening technical knowledge exchange with our partners. Leveraging the M&E framework, the framework includes select evaluations, assessments, and surveys to generate evidence of results and enhance the value add of F4D in contributing to the overall financial sector reform agenda. Data and information generated through these activities are turned into practical insights and shared among practitioners and development partners to scale up successful cases, learn from failures, promote accountability, and ultimately maximize development outcomes.
