Economics & Development

The objective of the Operation is to create more and better jobs in priority value chains by strengthening the skills ecosystem. This Program Appraisal Document covers Phase 3 of the Skills for Economic Transformation and Jobs (SET4Jobs) in Eastern and Southern Africa Multiphase Programmatic Approach (MPA) Program, approved by the World Bank’s Executive Directors on February 26, 2026. This phase only finances activities for Mozambique. The design presented in this document is within the scope of activities offered in the SET4Jobs MPA. It is aligned with Pillars 1, 2, and 3 of the MPA and includes selected activities from each of the supported pillars across components. There are no changes to the MPA Program Development Objective (PrDO), key indicators and their targets, theory of change or MPA framework. The government’s Skills for Jobs program, supported by this PforR, seeks to address fragmentation and weak labor market relevance in Mozambique’s skills system, which have limited its contribution to job creation in priority sectors. It is aligned with the forthcoming National Skills Strategy, which emphasizes improved access to job-relevant skills and stronger employment outcomes for youth through greater industry engagement, results orientation, and use of digital solutions. The program builds on MozSkills and other previous World Bank-supported projects, which established the legal, institutional, and instructional foundations on which MozJobs is designed to deliver employment results, including the Professional Education Law, the National Qualifications Framework, ANEP's strengthened regulatory capacity, the competency-based training curriculum now reaching over 43,000 students, and initial employer engagement and digital infrastructure. MozJobs shifts from this foundation-building phase toward operationalization, guided by three cross-cutting principles that reflect these shifts: (a) employer engagement in the design, delivery, and co-financing of training to strengthen labor market relevance; (b) results-based financing mechanisms that link funding to independently verified outcomes; and (c) the use of digital and technology-enabled solutions to expand access, improve efficiency, and support system management.

Cambodia has made substantial gains in school enrollment over the past two decades, yet these advances have not translated into improved learning outcomes. This report, Cambodia: Addressing Public Finance and Human Resource Bottlenecks to Education Outcomes, examines the governance challenges that continue to constrain the quality of education service delivery, with a primary focus on the basic education level. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between September and November 2024 across 18 schools in five provinces, as well as a comprehensive review of secondary data sources and international assessments, the report employs the World Bank's FinEd: PFM in Education Tool to identify six interrelated bottlenecks: limited access to quality early childhood education; insufficiently trained and unevenly distributed teachers; inadequate support for students falling behind; large class sizes compounded by infrastructure deficits; shortages of key inputs such as textbooks; and fragmented, outdated management information systems. The analysis reveals that Cambodia's education system remains significantly underfunded by the state, with households bearing approximately 59% of total education costs, while high wage expenditures (70–80 percent of the public education budget) have not yielded commensurate improvements in learning. The report finds that structural weaknesses in Public Financial Management (PFM), Human Resource Management (HRM), and data governance are the binding constraints preventing the system from delivering quality education at scale. The report presents a sequenced reform agenda, with short-term (1–2 year) and medium-term (3–5 year) recommendations spanning budget restructuring, teacher incentive reforms, streamlined procurement, greater school-level financial flexibility, and investment in an integrated data architecture. Addressing these bottlenecks in a coordinated manner is identified as essential if Cambodia is to achieve its ambition of becoming a high-income country by 2050.

This CPF FY26-FY30 for Republic of Yemen Annex 8 on Lessons from Third-Party Implementation (TPI) in Yemen reviews the World Bank’s extensive experience delivering operations through third-party implementers, primarily UN agencies, in a fragile and conflict-affected context. It highlights that the TPI model has enabled continued service delivery and preservation of implementation capacity despite conflict, while supporting large-scale humanitarian and development outcomes. However, challenges remain, including limited transparency, variable costs, weak institution-building, and data constraints. The annex proposes enhancing the TPI model through improved accountability, performance-based approaches, stronger data-sharing, and risk management, alongside a gradual transition toward localized delivery platforms to ensure sustainable impact and support long-term recovery.