World Bank and DIE broaden partnership

World Bank Group and German Development Institute broaden partnership to tackle global poverty and inequality

Press Release of 22 June 2015

Ending extreme poverty is one of the most important issues on the international agenda, and is central to the Sustainable Development Goals, which will be adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015. The past few decades have seen major progress in poverty reduction; however, in many cases, these gains have been accompanied by increased inequalities or persistent deprivations on other social dimensions. A deeper understanding of these issues is therefore needed, and is critical to the research and policy agenda.

To that end, the World Bank Group and the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) have today signed a Memorandum of Understanding to expand their collaboration in the field of research on poverty reduction and inequality.

“We will intensify our cooperation in the field of poverty measurement and policy analysis to gain deeper insights in the multiple effects of social, education, economic and other policies as well as in the determinants of poverty and inequality reduction,” said DIE-Director Dirk Messner, on the occasion of the signing.

As part of the partnership, the organizations will cooperate in areas such as how to improve to collect and improve survey data, how to better assess poverty and inequality in countries or how to build the capacity of national statistical offices where needed.

“By improving our understanding of the drivers and consequences of poverty, inequality, and deprivation, we can better advise policymakers in every country,” said Ana Revenga, Senior Director of the Poverty and Equity Global Practice at the World Bank Group. “This is critical for crafting policies and programs that will actually benefit the poorest and most vulnerable across the world.”

In this partnership, DIE can build on its long-standing poverty research agenda in areas such as how economic growth translates into poverty reduction, which compares the poverty-performance of different patterns of economic development and draws conclusions for pro-poor policies. DIE has developed its own novel framework for measuring multidimensional poverty and inequality changes, which is part of ongoing research by the World Bank Group and other institutions.

On the basis of the memorandum, the institutions will not only conduct research together, but also foster institutional processes to share knowledge and ideas, co-host conferences and training seminars, work together to disseminate key lessons learned and regularly evaluate the effectiveness of their partnership.