Watch the launch of the 2024 Trust Fund Annual Report on World Bank Live: How Trust Funds and FIFs Embody Partnership
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The complexity and urgency of the world’s challenges require meaningful collaboration among members of the development community and other stakeholders if the goal of ending poverty on a livable planet is to be realized. With overlapping crises threatening global development and a growing global demand for a bold and coordinated response to these crises, the World Bank is working to strengthen partnerships and utilize every resource available to maximize development impact.
The Bank works with a growing array of development partners, both traditional and non-traditional, formal, and informal, to help meet our shared goals. From the ongoing partnership with our sovereign donors, through engagement with foundations and civil society, to an increased focus on leveraging private capital, the Bank recognizes how transformative partnerships can be when new ideas, perspectives, and experiences are combined with the necessary financial resources.
Development partners work with the Bank through trust funds, financial intermediary funds, and co-financing arrangements:
- to align and pool funding support with other development partners within agreed strategic frameworks.
- to benefit from the Bank’s convening power, at both the international and country level, to maximize coordinated action and achieve impact at scale.
- to benefit from the Bank's extensive technical expertise, country experience and supervision capacity, its financial control framework, and its ability to monitor and report on results.
- to provide grant funding in fragile, conflict-affected, and other complex situations enabling the Bank to engage and provide critical assistance in circumstances where traditional instruments are not well-suited.
- to support innovative or emerging policy areas, which the Bank and Partners view as a priority.
Trust Funds
The World Bank uses trust funds, a financing arrangement set up with contributions from one or more development partners, to complement core funding from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), and the International Development Association (IDA) to help attain its institutional goals. Trust funds support the achievement of these goals by providing financial resources, contributing to the knowledge agenda, and leveraging the Bank’s convening power and global and local presence to contribute to country, regional, and global development. Trust funds allow the Bank to mobilize and direct concessional resources to strategic development priorities and to mobilize the resources and capabilities of other development actors through partnership programs.
Financial Intermediary Funds
Financial Intermediary Funds (FIFs) are financial arrangements that leverage a variety of public and private resources in support of international initiatives, enabling the international community to provide a direct and coordinated response to global priorities. FIFs are a key financing arrangement for the World Bank, where the Bank acts as a trustee of large multilateral financial mechanism to support global development initiatives and partnerships. As a FIF trustee, the World Bank provides financial services, including receiving, holding, and investing contributed funds, and transferring them when instructed by the FIF governing body.
Co-Financing
Co-financing is an important financing mechanism of the World Bank. The World Bank works with Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs), bilateral agencies, and other development partners to allow funds to flow directly from co-financers to the recipient client country and finance activities within the scope of a World Bank operation. Under these arrangements, World Bank resources and third-party resources are deployed in a coordinated manner to World Bank operations that are led by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) or the International Development Association (IDA).
