1. What is community and local development (CLD)?
Community and local development (CLD) is a development approach that empowers communities to identify and advance their development priorities.
CLD focuses on strengthening communities’ participation, influence, and partnership with local governments in the selection, design, and management of development interventions. By decentralizing decision-making processes and fund management, governments work in partnership with communities to ensure that investments respond to their needs and reflect their priorities.
CLD projects often fund efforts to deliver basic services like health and education, build or repair small-scale infrastructure, support job-creation and livelihoods, strengthen women’s economic empowerment, and increase resilience to climate change and other crises.
A hallmark of CLD is leveraging community platforms to enable collaborative decision-making and planning on which investments to prioritize, an approach that elevates the voice and influence of vulnerable groups in the development process and strengthens social cohesion and conflict mitigation among and between communities and governments.
2. Why is CLD important?
CLD has a deep history of driving development impact in challenging contexts. Experience shows that when given clear and transparent rules, access to information, and technical and financial support, communities can effectively identify shared priorities and address local development challenges by working in partnership with local governments and other institutions. CLD provides precisely these tools, and has proven uniquely effective across three domains: participation and accountability; socioeconomic benefits; and adaptability and reach.
Participation and accountability
CLD leverages the knowledge and collective action of communities to design and deliver projects, strengthening community ownership, public accountability, and the legitimacy and sustainability of development interventions.
Socioeconomic benefits
CLD has shown strong ability to increase access to quality infrastructure and services in a cost-effective manner, and to support inclusive growth, job-creation, and poverty reduction in the world’s most challenging development contexts.
Adaptability and reach
In many countries, CLD is the only mechanism that can reach remote, vulnerable groups with credible, timely development support, making the approach particularly effective in settings of fragility, conflict, and violence (FCV).
3. What is the World Bank Group doing on CLD?
World Bank-financed CLD investments represent a key pillar of the Bank’s operational engagement. At the end of FY24, active CLD project financing amounted to US$52.7 billion, around 10 percent of total World Bank financing.
The active CLD portfolio comprised 347 projects in 94 countries across every region, with AFE and AFW having the largest portfolio at a combined US$24.2 billion, followed by portfolios of US$5.9 billion in SAR, US$5.2 billion in EAP, and US$2.8 billion, US$2.4 billion, and US$2.2 billion in LCR, ECA, and MNA, respectively.
Even as the Social Development Global Department manages the Bank Group’s CLD knowledge and learning agenda, the approach is used by nearly all Bank departments, with Agriculture having the largest CLD portfolio at US$13.9 billion, followed by Urban (US$7.7 billion), Social Development (US$5.8 billion), Environment (US$4.1 billion), Social Protection and Labor (US$4 billion), and Digital, Energy, Institutions, and Health managing a combined US$ 2.6 billion of CLD financing.
As of end-FY24, 33 percent of active CLD projects and 35 percent of CLD financing went to countries on the Bank’s list of fragile and conflict-affected situations or working on an FCV agenda like forced displacement, illustrating the approach’s effectiveness in the world’s most difficult development environments.
