This post is from Bank Information Center - Amplifying Local Voices to Democratize Development.
by David Shaman
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The World Bank invests in knowledge to achieve its mission. The primary audience of its knowledge sharing is internal. Knowledge and data informs staff about good practices, country- and sector-specific issues and trends and operational successes and failures. The efficacy of knowledge sharing within the Bank has been a critical goal of reforms implemented by current Bank President Jim Kim in 2014 to transition the institution from a “knowledge bank” to a “solutions bank.”
The investment the Bank makes to create and share knowledge is also done to aid a second group of agents who the Bank recognizes as essential to helping it reduce poverty and make development sustainable. Knowledge and data empowers stakeholders such as media and civil society with information to understand and assess the Bank’s work as well as guide government officials, academia and country-based actors in the implementation of their own development initiatives.
Because of internal initiatives and external pressure, stakeholders have access to more information about the Bank in recent years. Still, a question remains: Do stakeholders know the right and best information in which to make informed decisions about development? Stakeholders know more about what the Bank produces and what it decides. Less clear is whether they know enough about how the Bank approaches its work, why it acts the way it does, and how it makes decisions. The process of development – the discussions, debates, meetings, dialogues – that formulates policies, positions the institution and moves projects remains largely out of view and behind closed doors.
World Bank Live (WBL), the institution’s video content platform, is a crucial conduit for sharing information to the public. In the past four years, WBL increased webcasting volume in the aftermath of civil society pressure, but remains a modestly used service. The Bank has focused resources on live events featuring senior officials and prominent personalities. This has resulted in well-advertised and glamorous events disseminating targeted messages, but comes at the expense of the potential impact Bank webcasts could have for its development mission.
Bank Information Center (BIC) analysis suggests a more mission-effective approach for WBL would be to shift its focus from almost exclusively featuring the Bank’s leadership towards one featuring Bank technical experts and researchers on the front lines of solving development challenges. Decentralized content sources and venues will create a more productive environment for knowledge sharing with external stakeholders and foster President Kim’s vision of a solutions bank. External Community Relations (ECR), the vice presidency managing WBL, also curates content using traffic data to determine what to feature. In fact, traffic metrics are not an appropriate measurement for the value of content shared and undermine the ability of viewers to make this determination. The Bank hosts hundreds of policy dialogues during the year focused on the institution’s repertoire that are invaluable to the development community but are not shared online. BIC also recommends WBL’s model of live webcasting shift to a model that primarily features on-demand webcasting. An on-demand model will allow WBL to vastly reduce webcasting expenses and will enable it to increase coverage and make the system far more diverse and inclusive. Finally, WBL should decentralize costs for using the service throughout the Bank and should seek to attract external content providers who can help subsidize its costs.
In a period when personnel often feel unconnected to stakeholders, internal evaluations of project performance show serious declines and the institution continues losing market share to competitors, a new WBL model provides an opportunity to slow, and perhaps, reverse these trends.
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This article by Julia Radomski originally appeared on bicusa.org on June 01, 2016 at 07:06PM
