16th Meeting of Senior Fellowships Officers of the ... - Development

Operational Issues 37
considered good in comparison to a general standard. In order to increase the percentage
of replies the World Bank had come up with the scaling up project which aimed at
tracing the fellows that had ended their studies several years ago. The idea of the scaling
up programme was to create communities of alumni that felt more attached to the
programme and stayed in touch with each other, providing the World Bank with information
about people that could not be reached. The other aspect that the scaling up
programme promoted was the idea of life-long learning. Ideally, fellows would get back
to their host institutions and to the Word Bank on a regular basis in order to guarantee
that they kept up with the latest developments in their fields of expertise.
K. Partnerships with Academic Institutions, Foundations and
NGOs, by Mr. Kamel Braham, Scholarship Administrator, the
Joint Japan/World Bank Programme
125. At the outset, Mr. Braham pointed out the importance of partnerships which the
World Bank had established with academic institutions in the field of fellowships. The
objective of these partnerships was to better respond to the specific needs of developing
countries for training of development professionals and managers. The programmes
financed Master’s degree studies in development-related fields all over the world. However,
it had turned out that some very specific needs for training could not be met.
That consideration had been the starting point for the JJ/WBGSP with a first training
module for economic policy analysts and advisors in the public sector of developing
countries. A second batch of programmes, fully funded by Japan, had been created in
order to benefit from the Japanese expertise.
126. The Economic Policy Management Programmes (EPM) started in 1992 by teaming
up with Columbia University after the World Bank had realized that no specific
Master’s degree could be found addressing Policy Management issues with an emphasis
on developing countries. While Columbia had created such a programme
just for the partnership with the World Bank at that time, currently only 25% of the
students still came from the World Bank Programme. The remaining 75% of the students
were regular Columbia University scholars which meant that the programme
had become a standard course delivered by the School of International and Public
Affairs at Columbia University. In 1994 it was decided to expand the programme
and increase the number of scholarships per year. One of the World Bank’s priorities
was Africa where programmes had been started with African Universities. The
process took place in two stages. At a first stage, in 1994, an Economic and Policy
Management Programme was set up in two countries. The Francophone programme
started at the Université d’Auvergne in Clermont-Ferrand (Centre d’Études et de
Recherches sur le Développement International, CERDI) and at McGill University
in Canada. Those programmes trained not only scholars but also academic staff who
afterwards would transfer the programmes to Universities in Africa. In 1998/1999
the Economic and Policy Management Programme was transferred to four African