Rethinking how knowledge is created, translated, and delivered so that it reaches the people who need it, when they need it, in a format they can use is necessary for impact. That is the challenge the World Bank Group Institute for Economic Development has taken on.
Our global network was built on a simple belief: that the distance between knowledge and the person who needs it most should be as short as possible. Producing knowledge is just one step — actively enabling its use is the other. We are doing this by creating partnerships, customizing knowledge, and using AI to help us deliver the right knowledge to the right audience at the right time.
The numbers tell part of the story. In the last two years, we have had over 70,000 users engaging on our platforms from 195 countries. We registered over 89,000 course enrollments and issued 14,000 certificates. Behind every metric is a person — a government official in Nairobi, a researcher in Dhaka, a development practitioner in Rome — who came looking for knowledge and left better equipped to act on it.
What we do is about engagement. We are designing customized experiences that turn complex research from the World Bank Group into clear, practical, and actionable knowledge — making engagement with evidence part of everyday professional practice.
How are we doing this?
There are thousands of World Bank Group reports with brilliant analysis, years of fieldwork, and peer-reviewed conclusions. And yet most of that knowledge sits behind long PDFs, in English, that take hours to process. To break language and access barriers for policy makers and researchers across the world, we developed innovative AI tools like AVA, an AI-research assistant trained with over 4,000 World Bank Group reports. AVA lets users interact with the reports and transform knowledge into slide decks, infographics, audio recaps, and quizzes in more than 60 languages in minutes, not hours.
In its 150,000 minutes of use around the world, one in five interactions is about policy work — designing or drafting. 97% of AVA answers carry citations from World Bank Group research which are then added to briefs and presentations.
