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Documented examples

Each record describes something a country built that the indicators do not capture. The source provides the published number; the mechanism is our interpretation.

Scores describe outcomes. These records describe how a country acted, what it needed and what happened. 863 of 863 records include a mechanism. They do not affect scores.

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3 of 863 deliveries

Coordination

1 delivery linked to Public-private collaboration.

Republic of the Congosince 2009still operatingbears on Public-private collaboration

Congo Terminal container concession at Pointe-Noire

The Congolese state conceded the Pointe-Noire container terminal to the Bollorรฉ group's Congo Terminal for 30 years from 2009, and container traffic through the Republic of Congo's ports rose from 355,000 TEU in 2010 to 1,046,064 TEU in 2024.

1,046,064 TEU, container port traffic, republic of congo, 2024. 355,000 TEU, container port traffic, republic of congo, first year in the series, 2010. World Bank, World Development Indicators, container port traffic (IS.SHP.GOOD.TU), from UNCTAD, retrieved 2026-10-17.

The move, and what it needed

The state and its port authority handed container handling at the country's one deep-water port to an international terminal operator under a long concession, and split the quay and equipment investment with it, so private capital and operating know-how carried the volume growth while the port stayed public.

Preconditions

  • A single natural gateway port, so one concession covers national container trade
  • An international operator willing to invest against a 30-year term
  • Demand from oil-sector imports and transit to inland neighbours

Limits: The series counts all container lifts in the country, not the concession's own output, and Pointe-Noire is the only container port, so the attribution is by geography. UNCTAD counts a transshipment box twice and includes empties, and Pointe-Noire handles transit and transshipment traffic, so the figure overstates the containers that serve the Congolese economy. The concession facts are not at the source URL: the 30-year award to Bollorรฉ and close to 700 million euros of modernisation since 2009, about half carried by the group, come from the French Treasury's country page (July 2021), and the 2009 start comes from the operator's figures as reported by Financial Afrik in January 2026. Volume is not performance: the World Bank and S&P Global Container Port Performance Index for 2024, as reported by Ecomatin, ranked Pointe-Noire 401st of 403 ports, with its score falling from -145 to -283. Traffic also follows oil revenue and the hinterland, so the growth cannot be credited to the concession alone. The operator is a foreign group, so the state's part is the award, the port authority's share of the quay investment and supervision of the contract.

Adaptability

1 delivery linked to Institutional responsiveness.

Republic of the Congosince 2020delivered and closedbears on Institutional responsiveness

Lisungi emergency cash transfers for COVID-19

The Republic of Congo's Ministry of Social Affairs and the Lisungi programme unit paid one-off emergency cash transfers of about US$82 to more than 206,800 mostly urban households hit by COVID-19 by April 2022, above a target of 200,000, while the social registry used to target them grew to more than 830,000 households and 95 percent of the transfers were paid digitally.

206,800 households (more than), households that received emergency cash transfers (ects) under the lisungi emergency covid-19 response project, 2022-04. 830,000 households (more than), households registered in the social registry (rsu) after the ect targeting, 2022-04. World Bank, Project Paper, First Additional Financing for the Lisungi Emergency COVID-19 Response Project (P177453, parent P174178), April 2022, retrieved 2026-10-02.

The move, and what it needed

The social affairs ministry used the existing Lisungi conditional cash transfer unit and its social registry to register urban households hit by COVID-19 and pay each a one-off digital transfer, growing the registry in the process so that later programmes could target from it.

Preconditions

  • A standing cash transfer programme unit (Lisungi) with a registry to build on
  • Emergency IDA financing approved within three months of the shock
  • Digital payment providers able to reach urban households

Where else it has been used: The same piggybacking on a standing programme as civ-ptmp-covid and cod-step-kin, but with a single small payment per household rather than a recurring transfer.

Limits: The World Bank financed the transfers (an IDA credit of US$50 million, US$20 million for the ECTs) and reports on its own project; the figures are in paragraphs 23 to 25 of the plain-text project paper, pages 12 to 13 of 59. The project's later Implementation Status Report (June 2026, P174178) gives 231,562 households benefiting from emergency cash transfers, so the count moved after this paper; the record uses the earlier dated figure. The response was slow for an emergency: the project was approved on 24 June 2020 and became effective on 9 October 2020, and the paper gives no date for the first or last ECT payment, so the time from shock to cash cannot be stated, only that 206,800 households had been paid by April 2022. Each household got one payment of about US$82, small against lost income. The same paper says the focus on the crisis delayed the government's plan to scale Lisungi to national coverage, and that procurement delays and a change of ministry leadership in May 2021 held up the registry and digital payment work. The government asked for the emergency money; the money and the design were the World Bank's.

Building

1 delivery linked to Large project delivery.

Republic of the Congosince 1976delivered and closedbears on Large project delivery

Realignment of the Congo-Ocean Railway through the Mayombe, and its overruns

The Republic of the Congo's transport agency ATC rebuilt an 88 km section of the Brazzaville to Pointe-Noire railway through the Mayombe range, with 19 bridges, three tunnels including one of 4.6 km and 17 million m3 of earthworks, completing it in mid-1985 against an expected end of 1979 at a cost of US$399 million against an estimate of US$149 million, an overrun of 168 percent.

399 million US dollars, total cost of the cfco realignment at completion, 1985. 149 million US dollars, cost of the cfco realignment estimated at appraisal, 1976. World Bank Operations Evaluation Department, Project Performance Audit Report, People's Republic of the Congo Second Railway Project (Loan 1228-COB, Credit 1047-COB), Report No. 8898, 29 June 1990, retrieved 2026-10-02.

The move, and what it needed

The state transport agency, running the railway at the same time, managed a mountain realignment with tunnels on engineering that underestimated the ground, and when bids came in high and the works slipped, ten lenders refinanced the doubling of cost rather than stop.

Preconditions

  • A single national rail corridor whose collapse was feared, which made stopping politically impossible
  • Lenders willing to add supplementary credits to a half-built line
  • Traffic forecasts tied to timber and manganese exports that did not materialise

Limits: The audit is the World Bank's evaluators on a project the Bank appraised and part financed: the realignment had ten financiers, including France, the European Community and the Bank's US$38 million loan and US$30 million supplementary credit, so the money was largely external and the audit judges the Bank's appraisal as much as ATC's execution; it says the Bank accepted detailed engineering based on inadequate soil, topographic and geological study and allowed physical contingencies of only 10 percent for earthworks and 15 percent for tunnels. Figures are nominal dollars over a decade of high inflation, so part of the overrun is price escalation. The 168 percent and five and a half year delay (a 157 percent time overrun) are the audit's own computations. Traffic, expected to double, stayed flat, and the audit puts the economic return at zero or negative and calls the project unsustainable, so the record is a delivery that was finished but did not pay off. The text is an OCR of a 1990 typescript and some words are garbled.