The Effectiveness of World Bank Support for Community-Based and -Driven Development

This is a country case study on Egypt undertaken as an input to an Independent Evaluation Group study of the World Bank's support for community-based development (CBD) and community-driven development (CDD) efforts. It is predominantly a desk study but involved also a field visit to the Matrouh Resource Management Project in association with an IEG Project Performance Assessment Report. Egypt represents a useful country case for five main reasons. First, it has recent participatory project interventions across quite a wide range of approaches. Second, Egypt is only relatively recently moving toward making participatory approaches central to development projects. Third, Egypt is a lower-middle income country with significant capacity and implementation skills at both government and community level. Fourth, in Egypt, there is a still quite undeveloped NGO sector compared to many other countries. Fifth, in many project areas there is an extremely conservative social environment, particularly in relation to the place of women, a contrast to some other case study countries. On balance, Bank performance on the participatory aspects of CBD/CDD approaches in Egypt has been largely satisfactory. There are five main findings with implications for action and one main recommendation. First, with respect to findings, some of the problems may arise from a weakness in identifying the core problem - the real underlying diagnosis - which generally seems to be weaknesses in public resource allocation and associated inefficiency in poverty impact. Second, sustainability is a major concern. Third, the intensive focus on community level processes may, in some cases, be diverting attention from important overriding policy issues. Fourth, there could be better coordination across projects at community level. Fifth, there are different approaches to decentralization reflected in the program with some projects supporting local government capacity and decentralization and others not supporting it, even arguably undermining it through alternative resource allocation routes.