United Nations – World Bank Group Partnership in Crisis-Affected Situations : 2022 UN-WBG Partnership Monitoring Report

Overview

Fragility, conflict, and violence pose serious challenges to global peace, stability, and development. Partnerships are critical in better supporting governments in crisis-affected settings to meet the multidimensional challenges facing people in those contexts. Since 2017, the United Nations and World Bank have partnered with each other to assist fragile, conflict and violence-affected countries based on a Framework for Partnership in Crisis-Affected Settings.

The framework has allowed the two institutions to draw on each institution’s mandate and comparative advantage to maximize the collective impact of their support to national priorities in crisis-affected settings.  This United Nations-World Bank Joint Monitoring Report highlights the strategic, analytical, operational and advocacy collaboration of the two institutions in more than 50 conflict-affected situations from 2020 to 2022.

The report documents examples of how the UN-World Bank partnership assisted countries to address the underlying causes of fragility, conflict, and violence (FCV), forced displacement and food insecurity.

Highlights

• Fostering a common understanding of local dynamics and realities in fragile contexts. The UN and World Bank stepped up their partnership through joint analyses and diagnostic assessments of root causes and factors driving conflict, fragility, and violence.  Such analytical works enhanced the ability of the two institutions to work together to better support countries’ national plans to chart their own paths toward peace, stability, and development.
• Tackling forced displacement using comparative strengths. Over 110 million people are estimated to be forcibly displaced worldwide. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) partnered with the World Bankto provide socioeconomic data, policy framework for refugee protection and basic service delivery to support forcibly displaced people and their host communities in more than 10 low- and middle-income crisis-affected settings.
• Combating hunger, starvation, and food insecurity. Fragility, violence, and conflict are considered key drivers of acute food insecurity, making crisis-affected countries particularly vulnerable. The UN and World Bank collaborated to help deliver food security in more than 20 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Middle East. The UN-WBG partnership on food and nutrition security played a critical role in establishing the Global Alliance for Food Security (GAFS), announced at the G7 in May 2022.
• Forging closer cooperation between UN peace and security actors and development partners: The World Bank teamed up with UN Security Council-mandated Special Political Missions and UN Peacekeeping Operations in insecure environments. Institutional collaboration between the World Bank and UN Special Political Missions took place in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, the West Bank and Gaza, Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen through varied modalities. In many cases, the Bank’s work is aligned with and builds on that of the UN Secretary-General’s Peacebuilding Fund.