Fiscal year 2025 marked a period of engagement and sustained momentum for the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) as we continued to align our work with the evolving priorities of the World Bank Group and the global development community. Our efforts this year were guided by a commitment to deepen engagement—both within the Bank Group and with external partners—and to accelerate the uptake and impact of evaluative evidence in support of better development outcomes.

There was increased IEG engagement with Bank Group operations staff and management in FY25. We hosted and co-hosted more than 23 learning events, reaching more than 1,000 staff across Regions and Verticals. Our strategy of embedding evaluation findings directly into operational learning—such as sharing lessons from the learning crisis and gender equality evaluations during retreats and townhalls—ensured that timely evidence could be used to inform project design and implementation.

We also advanced our partnership with the Bank Group’s Knowledge and Learning Directorate, catalyzing discussions with our learning in lending evaluation, supporting the World Bank Group Academy, and contributing to working groups on client capacity development. Notably, we piloted an AI-powered tool to extract and synthesize lessons from IEG validations, making evaluative insights more accessible and actionable for operations teams.

IEG’s work program in FY25 centered on the Bank Group’s long-term strategic priorities, as articulated in the Evolution Roadmap. Our evaluations spanned the five verticals of Planet, People, Prosperity, Infrastructure, and Digital Transformation, with cross-cutting streams on Gender; Fragility, Conflict, and Violence; climate; and private capital. We delivered seven thematic and corporate evaluations, five Country Program Evaluations, the Results and Performance of the World Bank Group report, and the Management Action Record validation.

IEG continued to play an important role in the global evaluation community, as co-chair of the Global Evaluation Initiative and a founding member of the Evaluation Cooperation Group. Together with partners, we contributed to major global events, such as the Evidence for Climate Action event series during COP; capacity-building efforts, such as the Glocal Evaluation Week; and methodological innovation, such as our experiments with integrating AI into evaluation processes. Our work on evaluation capacity development in client countries, delivered through the Centers for Learning on Evaluation and Results, continued to support the building of national monitoring and evaluation systems and contributing to a culture of evidence-based policymaking.

As we look to the future, IEG will continue to push the boundaries of evaluation practice—leveraging new technologies, deepening engagement, and maintaining our independence and rigor. By engaging with our partners across the Bank Group and beyond, we can ensure that evaluation remains a powerful driver of learning, accountability, and development effectiveness.

Image

Share Tweet Facebook WhatsApp Linkedin Email

Sabine Bernabè
Director-General, Evaluation