The article  was first published on OMFIF on  December4th， 2025

Akihiko Nishio is Vice President for Development Finance at the World Bank.

Partnerships are central to impactful development aid

When countries set out to transform their economies, the ambition is often clear, but the cost of these bold reforms can be complex. Too often, progress stalls not because of a lack of will, but because financing is fragmented: different procedures, multiple reporting lines and competing priorities all affect how efficiently we make progress.

But picture a scenario where development partners can put their resources behind a shared vision or project. With results and efficiency at the core of their delivery, partners work to apply a single set of procedures, streamline communication and draw on each other’s strengths. The result is not just more money at the table, but a coordinated project that is designed and delivered with greater impact than any one partner could achieve alone.

This vision is at the heart of our new report,  Building Together: Co-Financing with the World Bank ,  which illustrates how partnerships are central to delivering development impact more efficiently and at greater scale.

More than the sum of its parts

Strengthening partnerships is a key element of the World Bank Group’s new playbook aimed at boosting impact. Co-financing has been identified as an effective way to enhance development impact because, at its core, it puts efficiency and results ahead of process. This helps to reduce aid fragmentation, lowers transactional costs and allows countries to take the driver’s seat for large and complex projects.

In April 2024, ten multilateral development banks – including the World Bank –launched the Global Collaborative Co-Financing Platform to deepen project-level collaboration among MDBs, bilaterals and other co-financiers.

As of 15 October 2025, the portal has helped connect about $120bn in project needs, with 22 projects worth $23bn already moving forward. MDBs now provide the lion’s share of co-financing, with several bilateral agencies also joining, showcasing a new spirit of system-level collaboration.

What it looks like on the ground

But as we know, numbers alone don’t tell the full story. Several World Bank projects that have been co-financed over the last five years are highlighted in this report to illustrate how working collectively can enable greater efficiency and impact.

Across West and Central Africa, the Gambia River Basin Organization Interconnection Project linked four countries – The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal – through a regional transmission network, bringing electricity to more than 2.5m households and business, helping countries shift to cleaner energy sources and lay the foundation for a regional power market. Eight co-financiers – the World Bank, African Development Bank, European Investment Bank, Islamic Development Bank, West African Development Bank, Agence Française de Développement, KfW and Kuwait Fund for Arabic Economic Development – together provided $700m for the project.

And in Indonesia in the wake of Covid-19, a project designed to strengthen health systems brought together the Asian Development Bank, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Islamic Development Bank and World Bank to invest $4bn in ensuring health facilities across the country have the equipment and resources needed to provide quality care.

As these examples show, when financiers work together, their collaboration can turn ambition into lasting development impact.

As we look ahead, the challenge isn’t whether co-financing works but rather how we can scale it further. By aligning policies, streamlining procedures and deepening trust, we can unlock even greater results.

The lesson is clear: when institutions and countries stand together, we deliver more than the sum of our parts. Co-financing is proof that multilateralism works – by building together, we can move faster and achieve impact at the scale the world demands.