Political Economy

In 2015, Senegal’s central government blocked Dakar’s first municipal bond launch; a pioneering transaction supported by the World Bank. ICED considered what happened as part of an evidence review to inform DFID’s new Cities and Infrastructure for Growth programme (CIG) and identified three key lessons for technical programming .

DFID’s recent Inclusive Growth Diagnostics highlighted that in many DFID priority countries energy is a key constraint to economic growth. Energy reform is highly political, and any attempts to support sector reform without an understanding of the domestic and international political landscape are likely to fail. This case study seeks to draw out key success […]

Despite being the largest economy in Africa, Nigeria is severely constrained by low quality, decaying infrastructure and inadequate power supply. Responding to these constraints DFID established the Nigeria Infrastructure Advisory Facility (NIAF), a demand driven technical assistance programme to support more Phase 1 ran from November 2007 to November 2011 (£32.6 million). NIAF II continued […]

Traditionally, donor programmes have been established using a simple formula, whereby SPs estimate the total overhead for a programme through tender, against a fixed set of inputs and workplan. In these programmes, clients need to wait months or years before assistance is deployed due to procurement procedures, by which time resource allocation, costs, and plans […]

Energy reform is highly political, and any attempts to support sector reform without an understanding of the domestic and international political landscape are likely to fail. Whilst all politics are defined by local circumstances, useful learning is emerging on how to build political commitment and maintain it through the reform process. This paper seeks to […]