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1 For example, the report demonstrates what had been expected: that countries with stronger government leadership; investments in human capital and health system strengthening; prior pandemic and epidemic experience; and prior World Bank–related investment such as the Regional Disease Surveillance Systems Enhancement program and analytical work or both were able to mount a more effective response. Advisory services and analytics were critical for informing the design of COVID-19 operations and for a broader policy dialogue on immediate and longer-term responses (for example, the flagship paper on health financing challenges in developing countries From Double Shock to Double Recovery—Implications and Options for Health Financing in the Time of COVID-19: Technical Update 2. Old Scars, New Wounds).

2 The Multiphase Programmatic Approach offered an umbrella approach with a menu of components and interventions that participating countries could adapt to their needs in line with the World Bank’s country-based model and strengthen to address subsequent stages of the response. This allowed projects to maintain some uniformity in content, with the added advantage of increased speed of design, processing, and approval, and a menu of indicators for countries to tailor to their individual circumstances.

3 The World Bank is a founding member of the Gavi Alliance, the vaccine alliance, and played an important role as an implementing partner of the Gavi Alliance even before COVID-19. The World Bank was part of COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) from its inception, and participated in decision-making on COVAX through the Gavi Board.

4 The Emergency Operations Center team prepared the following: A model Operational Manual in April 2020 that was translated into Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Russian to facilitate the start of implementation of Multiphase Programmatic Approach operations; “how to” guidance notes, including for processing retroactive funding requests; technical notes on several aspects of the health response and challenges that arose during the early months of the pandemic; regular weekly and bi-weekly global learning seminars that facilitated the cross-fertilization of knowledge among country officials, high level experts, and World Bank Group staff; and a template for Project Papers of AF-V operations (October 2020), later taken over by Operations Policy and Country Services.

5 Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice had a similar central resource hub with regional focal points, weekly (later monthly) meetings to provide advice to teams, extensive guidance material on a SharePoint site and a tracking system to monitor the Social Protection and Jobs response, which was used extensively for Senior Management briefings.

6 For example, women and girls bearing the burden of caring for the sick or of providing child and elderly care during the pandemic; losing jobs and being ineligible for a social safety net due to the informal nature of employment; and the importance of engaging women’s community groups to carry out knowledge dissemination and service provision.

7 External factors also played a role in the disruption of essential health services. For example, even when services were available, people were afraid to use them for fear of catching COVID-19; this was particularly true for services like childhood immunization. Although the report correctly identifies the gap in World Bank’s support for demand-side engagement of communities, this should be further qualified by noting that client governments have limited capacity to design and execute demand-side community engagement interventions in both emergency and nonemergency situations. In addition, governments’ and the World Bank teams’ limited attention to community engagement and continuity of essential health and education services should be understood in the context of an overwhelming pandemic with little understanding of virus behavior—and in the absence of proven preventive and treatment measures. The focus of the response was on early detection and containment through a test and trace strategy, along with wide-scale lockdowns to prepare health systems to handle the pandemic.

8 On March 16, 2022, the World Bank published its report Walking the Talk: Reimagining Primary Health Care After COVID-19, and has completed the latest flagship report Change Cannot Wait: Building Resilient Health Systems in the Shadow of COVID-19—Investing in Health System Resilience for the Anthropocene, which underscores the importance of pandemic preparedness and strengthening systems.

9 See Multiphase Programmatic Approach projects for Afghanistan, Papua New Guinea, India, Argentina, Ecuador, Indonesia, Haiti, Iran, Senegal, Somalia, and Ukraine.

10 See https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/09/09/new-fund-for-pandemic-prevention-preparedness-and-response-formally-established..

1 An in-depth analysis of COVID-19 commitments and financing allocations 
is outside the scope of the current evaluation. The evaluation provides an estimate from available data on the portfolio for the time period, countries, and Global Practices covered 
by the analysis.

2 The Inform COVID-19 Risk Index was used to categorize countries based on their vulnerability to development achievements being offset by the pandemic. The evaluation adjusted the index to consider the country’s human capital index, given concerns surrounding losses of human capital in countries. The countries were then separated into quartiles based on their vulnerabilities to development and human capital losses (very high vulnerability, high vulnerability, moderate vulnerability, and low vulnerability). Appendix B includes a list of the countries in the portfolio by vulnerability quartile. The Inform COVID-19 Risk Index includes dimensions of social inclusion (such as gender inequality and poverty), economic vulnerability, governance and institutional capacity, health systems capacity, environment, and population risks (such as access to sanitation and population mobility and density; Poljanšek, Vernaccini, and Marin Ferrer 2020; World Bank 2020f).

1 The human capital data on investment before COVID-19 was coded as part of a separate Independent Evaluation Group analysis. The human capital data cover Health, Nutrition, and Population; Social Protection and Jobs; and Education Global Practice projects between July 3, 2014, and January 15, 2020 (World Bank, forthcoming). Interventions to support human capital in countries before COVID-19 were reviewed in six areas: (i) essential health services (child survival and maternal mortality and improved equitable health access); (ii) critical health services (improved pandemic preparation capacity); (iii) protecting the vulnerable (connecting workers to jobs, expanded social program coverage, improved job skill readiness, improved targeting of lowest quintile, increased birth and social registration, and integrated social protection systems); (iv) ensuring child welfare and social services (inclusive education, learning outcomes, quality of teaching, school environment, early childhood development, and stunted growth of children); (v) gender (fertility and adolescent pregnancy, gender-based violence, female higher education and science, technology, engineering, mathematics enrollment, and female labor participation); and (vi) digitalization (information and communication technology policies, information and communication technology for better targeting and for quality service, and digital skills). The total number of areas supported in 
a country before COVID-19 was used to identify countries with different levels of human capital support by quartiles: 1 (very low), 2 (low), 3 (high), and 4+ (very high). The analysis includes 80 countries in the evaluation portfolio with available data on human capital support before COVID-19

1 COVID-19 Vaccine Deployment Tracker. https://covid19vaccinedeploymenttracker.worldbank.org/tracker