What then can the WBG do to support a Solutions Partnership? In addition to mobilizing enhanced public-private financing, we are making five fundamental shifts to help country stakeholders collaborate and iteratively tackle key developmental challenges through development solutions:

First, we seek to make a radical departure from a lending projects approval mentality to a development solutions culture, so that we are more focused on results; more programmatic in mobilizing the bundle of finance, knowledge and convening services to achieve results; more flexible, adaptive and learning-oriented, including through real-time feedback from citizen-beneficiaries; more deliberate in creating safe spaces to incubate innovative solutions; and more focused on implementation and delivery of results. The continuous interplay of designing interventions using evidence; implementing them in an iterative way; and, learning deliberately throughout the process—that is a key aspect of what President Kim referred to in his speech last year as the Science of Delivery. To operationalize this, we will support teams, from within our organization and beyond, to develop the tools and the methods to embark on a solution cycle rather than a project cycle. We will help them to collect the evidence to frame the problems; help them bring together the stakeholders to develop consensus; help them course correct during implementation; and help them to effectively measure results.

Second, throughout this solutions cycle, we need to more systematically mobilize global knowledge and innovation of “what works”, informed by local context. This requires the best evidence-based solutions for our country clients from our global leadership in development research, combined with systematic partnerships—including with think tanks, academia, CSOs and the private sector—both globally and nationally. Beyond research, our world today is also enriched with multiple but dispersed sources of practitioner knowledge. As a unique global development organization, the WBG has a key role in mobilizing these multiple sources of development knowledge to help clients solve their challenges. For instance, South-South knowledge sharing among developing country practitioners offers unprecedented opportunities to share lessons from success and failure, as well as deep implementation knowledge. Today developing country practitioners want to learn from each other, for instance how China lifted 500 million people out of poverty in three decades, or how Mexico’s Opportunidades program improved schooling and nutrition for millions of children. There is an enormous interest to learn from Korea’s success—a tremendous opportunity for Korea to serve as a knowledge hub for the delivery of development solutions. We have an important role in mobilizing and scaling such knowledge sharing through our operations. And we need to deploy new platforms, such as competitions and challenges, o crowd-source global and local solutions to complex challenges that can then be incubated and scaled up. Transformational platforms—such as Alibaba in China that markets local products at scale from the base of the pyramid, or mobile phone apps that help the poor provide feedback on service delivery -- boost our fight to end poverty. We need to infuse and scale up such innovative approaches to entrepreneurs and citizens worldwide using our operations, convening power and partnerships.

Third, alongside mobilizing global knowledge and innovation, we need to more systematically capture, mobilize and deploy our internal operational knowledge and innovation across the institution and our client base. On any given day, the World Bank Group is engaged in thousands of operational interactions in well over 100 countries. But sharing this operational knowledge is hampered by weak incentives, including our institutional fragmentation into regional silos with very limited flow of expertise and knowledge among them. To this end, we are launching far-reaching organizational reforms, by creating unified pools of technical experts under global practices to flow talent and knowledge across the Bank Group. We will provide incentives and supporting systems to systematically codify what we learn through our operational engagements and external partners on a global platform of what works under different circumstances, and make it widely available. We will also continue to make our data accessible. And we will redouble our efforts to create a culture of innovation and smart risk-taking, to create safe spaces for staff to co-create innovative solutions with partners through disciplined, data-driven experimentation.

Fourth, we need to systematically translate this global-local knowledge into effective learning programs for country clients and our staff to enhance their capacity to achieve results. We will bring our clients and our staff together in an Open Learning Campus, so that they can learn from each other and jointly develop the skills that are needed to solve the complex challenges of our time. We will seize opportunities to dramatically scale up learning, for example through massive open online courses or MOOCs.

Fifth, to achieve accelerated results, we need to not only strengthen technical skills but importantly leadership and coalition building skills to manage political economy obstacles and make change happen. Through our learning programs, we need to strengthen the collaborative leadership skills of change agents from government, the private sector and civil society so they can forge a shared vision and coalition for action, prioritize and monitor delivery, persist through inevitable obstacles, and achieve visible results. Helping to build a new cadre of leadership, in developing countries and inside our organization, will be a top priority for us to power the change agents as engines to end poverty. We have already started by building a Network of Delivery Leaders (Heads of States from six new governments), and we intend to cascade this within and across countries.