Landscape Survey - State of Economic Inclusion 2019-2020

To map the universe of economic inclusion programs, the PEIMT reviewed the World Bank financing portfolio as well as external sources. The first stage of the World Bank portfolio scan involved manually reviewing ongoing and pipeline projects from the Social Protection and Jobs (SPJ) Global Practice, listed in the World Bank Operations Portal, across all geographical regions. To determine whether a program focused on economic inclusion, the PEIMT reviewed each project's development objective and the component description included in its Project Appraisal Document (PAD) or, when a PAD was not available, its Project Information Document (PID), Project Paper (PP), or Project Information and Integrated Safeguards Data Sheet (PSDS).

As a second stage, in order to validate each economic inclusion program and to speed up the mapping process, the PEIMT worked with the Text and Data Analytics (TDA) team from the Development Economics (DEC) department of the World Bank. Using a predefined set of keywords , the TDA team applied advanced text analytics to projects' summaries as well as to their PADs, PIDs, PPs, or PSDSs. They applied this technique to a total sample of approximately 1,200 projects (both active and pipeline) across all geographical regions under these Global Practices: Urban Resilience and Land; Social Development; Social Protection and Jobs; Finance, Competitiveness and Innovation; and Agriculture and Food. The team then ranked projects based on the number of keywords found. Any project that had at least one keyword could be considered an economic inclusion project. The PEIMT then compared the TDA-assisted selection with the manual selection for the SPJ projects and found that the results were accurate in correctly excluding projects. The TDA-assisted selection, however, also included far more projects than the manual review did.

To finalize the mapping of World Bank-financed economic inclusion projects, the PEIMT team manually reviewed the TDA-assisted selection of economic inclusion projects for the remaining Global Practices. The team assessed the relevance of a project based on project summaries, the types of words identified through the TDA techniques, and the frequency with which keywords came up in the project documents. In some cases, when a summary did not provide enough information, the PAD was reviewed to make a final decision. Overall, the TDA methods allowed the PEIMT to trim the number of projects for review by half. In total, the PEIMT identified 149 World Bank economic inclusion projects (representing 92 individual government programs in 57 countries ). Surveys were sent to these 92 unique identified programs, and responses were received back from 77 of them. The mapping of World Bank-supported projects was updated in June 2020 through a full manual review of nearly 50 projects from the Environment and Natural Resources Global Practice, which resulted in 17 additional projects and a total of 166 economic inclusion projects supported by the World Bank.

To map projects outside of World Bank operations, the PEIMT used the PEI's 2017 survey dataset to identify projects that were still ongoing as well as partners, including governments, NGOs, regional organizations, multilaterals, and other development partners involved in economic inclusion programming. Organizations were approached to self-identify programs that met a prescribed set of criteria, which had been developed based on the working definition of economic inclusion programs. Since the 2017 survey captured mostly non-government programs, in order to map other relevant economic inclusion interventions the PEIMT scanned several databases and inventories of social protection and productive inclusion programs, including ECLAC's database of labor and productive inclusion programs in Latin America and the Caribbean and Manchester's Social Assistance database. The number of projects identified outside of the World Bank portfolio totaled 146, from which 140 responses were expected and 127 responses were received.