“I can mobilise more private capital, but you’ll get less impact.” That was the candid view of a European DFI CEO I spoke with at the World Bank annual meetings, and it captures the central challenge facing development finance right now.
Private capital mobilisation (PCM) was the dominant theme of the meetings. The World Bank arrived with record figures, $112 billion mobilised in FY26, triple the level of four years ago. The message from the podium was to do more, faster. Far less was said about what all that capital is achieving.
The warning signs are there. PCM in low-income countries has stagnated, and the latest MDB Joint Report showed a fall of roughly 35% on the previous year. Capital flows most easily to middle-income markets, which is where MDB investment is likely to be least additional.
The problem is that we can’t properly verify or track any of this. The International Finance Corporation (IFC) accounts for most of the World Bank Group’s mobilisation, yet it doesn’t disclose disaggregated PCM data, so we can't see which deals are mobilising finance, in which countries or sectors. Impact data is patchy, and clients choose which indicators to disclose. Despite all the talk of jobs, the World Bank Scorecard’s jobs indicator still has no methodology, two and a half years after launch. And we can’t see how deals are priced or how much subsidy they carry.
Meanwhile, we risk sleepwalking into treating the release of aggregated, anonymised data, often agreed under NDAs, as transparency. Initiatives like the GEMs risk database deserve real credit for getting data into the open, but aggregate statistics on public finance are not the same as accountability.
This matters directly to philanthropy. Funders are increasingly asked to derisk or subsidise DFI and MDB investments with no meaningful insight into the deal or its impact. As one observer put it to me, “the single worst use of philanthropic funding is to derisk an MDB so it can keep its AAA rating.” Funders have real leverage here: concessional capital should come with disclosure of pricing, subsidy and expected impact.
Finally, we need to look beyond the institutions themselves. The real test of mobilisation is whether institutional investors eventually enter these markets without MDB or DFI support. At present, there is no systematic way of tracking that.
Shifting the conversation from dollars and ratios to impact starts with better data.
For further reading on this subject, please see Paul James’s blog, Scale dominated the World Bank annual meetings – but where was the evidence of impact?