Across the world, progress in development has slowed. Yet some countries have found ways to make remarkable gains.
Consider the examples of Rwanda, the Kyrgyz Republic, Cambodia, and Ethiopia. Each shows that development gains remain possible when governments focus on practical reforms, invest in infrastructure, and build institutions that can deliver results. Their experiences are a reminder that while the global picture is troubling, stagnation is far from inevitable.
At the broadest level, the picture is sobering. For most of the past 75 years, the arc of development bent upward: poverty fell, life expectancy rose, more children went to school, and access to essential services expanded. Today, that momentum has weakened sharply. The World Bank Group’s latest Atlas of Global Development shows that, on average, countries are progressing at their slowest pace since 1950.
This slowdown is visible across many of the measures that matter most for human well-being: poverty reduction, health, schooling, infrastructure, and incomes. If current trends persist, more than 50 developing economies could take a century or more just to reach the development levels seen in high-income countries. That should trouble us all—because slower development means that hundreds of millions of people will have to wait decades longer for the things that prosperity brings: better jobs, better schools, better health care, and higher living standards.
It is tempting to attribute the slowdown entirely to recent shocks such as pandemic aftershocks, climate disasters, debt distress, and conflict. Those pressures are real. But the troubling truth is that the slowdown began before the pandemic. This is not simply a story of crisis. It is also a story of weak productivity growth, insufficient investment, fragile institutions, and policy frameworks that have too often favored short-term firefighting over long-term transformation.
This is precisely why the World Bank Group is building the Knowledge Bank. Our role is not only to finance development, but to shorten the distance between evidence and implementation—to help countries identify proven approaches, adapt them to local circumstances, and scale them more quickly.
What Successful Countries Have in Common
Consider Rwanda. In the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, few would have predicted the scale of the country’s recovery. Yet Rwanda reduced extreme poverty from about 90 percent to less than 40 percent, and if it sustains this pace, it could bring extreme poverty below 10 percent by 2050. That achievement did not happen by accident. Rwanda combined sustained economic growth with a capable state, large-scale public investment, and a structural shift of labor toward higher-productivity activities, especially in services such as trade, tourism, transport, and conferences. Rwanda’s experience reminds us that growth alone is not enough. Lasting progress depends on institutions that can implement reforms consistently over time.
read more: https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/voices/development-against-the-odds
