Africa Program

The Country Assistance Strategy (CAS) is the World Bank’s “master plan” for a given country. It is a document prepared by the World Bank which defines the Bank’s strategy for lending and non-lending assistance to a given country, typically over a three-to-five-year period. The strategy indicates anticipated Bank operations in the country, including projected lending levels and the composition of assistance, such as thematic and sector priorities, as well as some of the policy reforms (“triggers”) on which the country’s future access to Bank financing may depend.

While the Bank’s country strategies are supposed to be developed on the basis of consultations with stakeholders, CAS processes are frequently criticized for their lack of transparency and failure to reflect citizen concerns or priorities for Bank support.

African countries receive the largest share of funds from the World Bank’s low-income lending window, the International Development Association (IDA). A significant portion of those funds are channeled through structural and sectoral “adjustment” loans, now called “development policy loans,” which are conditioned upon the adoption of specific policy reforms and programs.

In 2000, the World Bank introduced a requirement that countries receiving IDA funds develop Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) outlining a macroeconomic framework for reducing poverty in order to access debt relief or other development aid from the World Bank and IMF.

In theory the PRSP is to be developed through public comment and debate. However, critics note that some key macroeconomic issues, like trade reforms and public spending targets, are often excluded from public discussions and appear identical from one PRSP to the next, suggesting that they are standard prescriptions rather than tailored solutions to each country’s problems.

Increased attention to oil in the Gulf of Guinea, mineral resources across the continent, and large energy projects has drawn the WBG’s support of extractive industries and energy sector development into the limelight.

Many African economies are heavily reliant on natural resource extraction. During the 1990s, extractive industries accounted for more than 50 percent of Africa’s exports and 65 percent of foreign direct investment in the continent.

Through policy and program lending, the World Bank has encouraged and facilitated reliance on extractive industry commodity exports throughout Africa and has indicated plans to increase investment in extractive sectors in coming years. Furthermore, Bank support for energy projects which are heavily reliant on extracted resources far exceeds its support for alternative energy technology.

While the World Trade Organization (WTO) may be the international institution with the most prominent impact on trade policy, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) play an altogether more subtle role in promoting trade liberalization.

African economies are among the hardest hit by policy-based (“adjustment”) loans that tie aid to economic conditionalities such as the lowering of tariffs, privatization and other liberalization schemes. These reforms help open up economies, frequently to the detriment of the development interests and economic priorities of a country’s population.

African economies are also influenced by the World Bank and IMF through their non-lending instruments, such as policy advice and published assessments of countries’ compliance with IFI-supported trade reforms, which can affect other donors’ support for a country. 

Despite widespread agreement that Africa’s debt burden is unsustainable and although millions of dollars have been provided as “debt relief,” Africa remains far from resolving the pressing issue of debt.

In an effort to reduce the burden of developing countries’ indebted economies, the IMF introduced its Highly Indebted Poor Countries initiative (HIPC) in 1996. Since then, over half of sub-Saharan African countries have sought assistance through this initiative; African countries make up 34 of the world’s 42 “Heavily Indebted Poor Countries” (HIPC). In order to access debt relief, African countries have had to comply with a variety of economic conditionalities, from facilitating export-oriented investments and eliminating preferential treatment for domestic companies, to privatizing public enterprises and introducing user-fees for services. Critics claim these and other conditions have undermined countries’ sovereignty and ability to prioritize social development spending, and have failed to lead to meaningful debt reduction.