This post is also available in: Arabic
September 2014
A group of Egyptian Civil Society Organizations (CSO)s participated in an event on the Systematic Country Diagnostic (SCD) held at the World Bank office in Cairo in September 2014. An SCD is currently being prepared for Egypt as part of the World Bank’s process of developing a new Country Partnership Framework (CPF) to govern its operations in Egypt within the next 4 to 6 years (2015 to 2019). According to the Bank, the SCD is a neutral analysis that is based on available evidence and aims to assess the most critical constraints to, and opportunities for, poverty alleviation and shared prosperity in a given country.
Prior to the event, the group of CSOs sent a joint statement to the World Bank’s Cairo office including their comments regarding the SCD process in Egypt and their recommendations on what content should be included.
The CSOs also requested that the SCD draft be shared with them prior to the date of the SCD consultation. In addition, they asked the Bank to share more information as to what would be discussed in that session. Invitations were sent to attendees less than 5 days prior to the date of the session, only after CSO representatives contacted the World Bank office to ask where they are in the CPF process currently. In the invitation and in communications with Bank staff, it was not clear to participants whether the scheduled session was considered an official consultation session.
Attendees of the SCD session which took place on 25 September 2014 reported that there was an hour and a half presentation regarding the outlines of the SCD content. Participants praised that the language used took into consideration some of the studies presented by CSOs to the Bank through the Bank’s consultation website page for Egypt (See submission by EIPR to the World Bank on Poverty in the context of the SCD here). However, space was not made available for a meaningful discussion of the presentation that was made, or of the SCD process in general.
Participants did comment positively on the fact that the arrangement granted more freedom in terms of the topics to be discussed in comparison to the format applied in the CPF consultations which were held in Cairo, Alexandria, and Aswan in July 2014. However, they criticized the absence of high-level Bank officials who are capable of making the actual commitments.
Despite multiple requests made by CSOs for the release of the SCD draft and its availability in Arabic, Bank staff refused to release the document, stating that the SCD draws on a large number of documents concerning the Egyptian economy, and that it would not be made available outside the World Bank in the current draft stage.
It is worth mentioning that the Bank’s SCD guidelines provide that the same disclosure rules as in the Economic Sector Report (ESR) should be applied with respect to the SCD. According to the Bank’s Access to Information policy the draft of the ESR should be disclosed for consultation. Also according to the Bank’s Consultation Guidelines, invitations and relevant materials should be sent to participants ahead of time. As previously mentioned, for the SCD event held in Cairo on the 25 September, formal invitations were sent less than a week before the proposed date and with no materials. While an initial communication from the World Bank to CSOs described the SCD session in Cairo as a consultation, the official invitation was unclear as to whether the session was considered a consultation, and CSOs were later informed that the session had been defined as a dialogue session rather than a consultation. At this time, the Bank has not announced any plans to hold an official consultation session to receive stakeholder input on the SCD, although according to its tentative timeline two additional phases of stakeholder consultation sessions are planned to inform the development of the CPF.
The SCD and the CPF are expected to be discussed by the World Bank Executive Board in Q1 2015 and Q2 2015, respectively.