Partnership for Economic Inclusion Annual Report 2020

Fiscal year (FY) 2020 was a critical and successful foundational year for the Partnership for Economic Inclusion (PEI). During this start-up year, PEI fast-tracked country engagement efforts and identified a diverse portfolio of countries receiving grant and technical support. Working closely with technical partners, PEI moved to reshape the global knowledge-sharing agenda on economic inclusion through a systematic review of country operations and global experiences—captured in the forthcoming State of Economic Inclusion Report—and the delivery of an open access data platform on program design, implementation, and costing.

This combination of country engagement, partnership, and global knowledge efforts reflects PEI’s focus on evidence and operational learning to understand the feasibility and sustainability of scaling up economic inclusion at the country level. With the first-year foundations now in place, PEI is set for a dynamic medium-term work program. Of course, as the fiscal year ended, the global context shifted with the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 required real-time workplan adjustment, including the postponement of a Global Learning Event that had been at an advanced planning stage. COVID-19 also quickly revealed a dual challenge of how to adapt economic inclusion delivery in the early stages of a pandemic and how to ensure country readiness to support medium- and longer-term recovery efforts. PEI has responded to this double challenge by ensuring economic inclusion is integral to the World Bank Group’s institutional pandemic response—reflected in the World Bank Group COVID-19 Crisis Response Approach Paper (2020)—and triaging a growing country demand to reform and adapt existing and new interventions to promote recovery.

The unfolding COVID-19 crisis presents a one-off opportunity—and challenge—to coalesce large-scale economic inclusion programs led by government. With adaptive social protection systems forming the backbone of the first wave of response, the scale-up of economic inclusion programs is an important complement for households and communities moving forward.