The goal of the World Bank’s procurement processes is to ensure client countries get the best value for every development dollar while promoting good practices and innovation. The 2016 reform aimed to modernize these processes based on cutting-edge, international good practice principles. The IEG report highlights the progress made and offers insights to further enhance the reform's impact. World Bank supported projects that successfully applied the reform principles obtained better value for money and results. Furthermore, the evaluation reveals that the reform is on the right track and implementation can be scaled up. 

Take Early Action: Starting procurement early is crucial for better project performance. Projects with satisfactory implementation ratings often had about 40% of contracts signed by the end of the first year of implementation. Success depends on advance planning and addressing issues before they cause delays. Frequent procurement issues relate to preparing terms of reference, bidding projects and evaluating proposals. 

Key Factors Enabling Early Procurement: 

• Human Resources: Client countries need qualified procurement experts from the start. These experts are essential to start procurement early and quickly identify and solve issues, leading to better results. World Bank project team leaders interviewed by the evaluation team stated that clients often face considerable challenges in finding qualified experts in their countries, which delays procurement activities. 
• World Bank Support: The World Bank can provide more support early in project implementation. Hands-on expanded implementation support has shown strong results in helping low-capacity clients reduce procurement issues and speed up procurement. 
• Strategic Planning: Collaborative strategic procurement planning, led by clients and involving technical and procurement teams, leads to fewer delays. However, only a minority of projects currently use their procurement strategies effectively. 

Focus on Quality: Timely market analyses help find capable suppliers and avoid delays. Activities like discussions with potential suppliers and desk reviews can be effective. Clients often lack the experience or tools to conduct these analyses. Additional support to clients and simple measures, such as World Bank staff participation in meetings with suppliers, can help scale up market analysis. Emphasizing quality, sustainability, and innovation in procurement decisions improves outcomes. In particular, the focus on quality should not be restricted to criteria that are formally evaluated, and should be a concern throughout the procurement cycle, from planning, procurement preparation, approaches, oversight, and learning. The World Bank can support clients in adopting market analysis and quality approaches through coaching and enhanced country engagement. 

Tailor Support, Oversight, and Capacity Strengthening: Effective risk management involves timely and collaborative efforts to help clients identify and mitigate risks. This includes considering a broad range of risks beyond high-cost international procurement. Data on other risks, such as human resource capacity, oversight, quality, innovation, markets, and procurement timing, could be used to tailor World Bank procurement support and oversight in client projects. Adopting a more collaborative, data-driven approach that looks at the full spectrum of risks would better support procurement outcomes. 

• Customized Support and Oversight: Modernized World Bank data systems are needed to inform decisions on World Bank support to clients. For example, dashboards could provide baselines and targets for decision-making, predictive analytics to prevent processing issues, flags, and risk profiling information. Data collection could be simplified for clients and could be used to target support to projects with slower procurements. 
• Tailored oversight can help low-capacity clients address problems and learn to improve their procurement.
• Capacity Strengthening: Engaging with country clients and focusing on strategic capacity building can prevent urgent issues and improve project performance. Country-level engagement could create further buy-in for the reform’s adoption, resolve repeat procurement issues, and tailor procurement to countries’ specific contexts. 

In conclusion, the World Bank is committed to supporting the reform’s implementation and maximizing its potential. This involves rethinking procurement governance arrangements within the World Bank, enhancing data systems, improving risk-based decision-making, and promoting staff incentives. The reform has already led to increased efficiency and better project outcomes, with the potential for even greater impact.