Analyzing and Enhancing the Role of International Agencies in Policy-Making

When we think about how countries tackle poverty, education, or healthcare, the spotlight usually falls on domestic governments. Yet behind many of the country’s biggest policy breakthroughs, there’s a quieter force at work: international agencies. From the World Bank co-financing massive education drives to UNICEF helping design classrooms for first-generation learners, these organisations have become deeply woven into the fabric of modern policy-making. So how effective have they really been in supporting development, and where does their role need to evolve next?

The shape of international involvement in domestic policy 🔗

International agencies aren’t a monolithic bloc. They include multilateral development banks like the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, UN specialised agencies such as UNICEF, UNESCO, WHO and ILO, bilateral donors, and funds tied to specific goals like climate or health. Each brings a different mix of money, technical expertise, and convening power to the table.

Their influence in India has historically flowed through a handful of channels: concessional finance for large programmes, technical assistance in programme design, capacity building for government staff, and global benchmarks that shape domestic targets. The United Nations supports India’s aspirations to end poverty and inequality and to promote sustainable development in line with the globally agreed SDGs, and this support has taken concrete form through a series of country cooperation frameworks aligned with national priorities.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), adopted in 2000, gave this collaboration a sharper frame. Eight measurable goals, 21 targets, and a 2015 deadline forced governments and agencies to pull in the same direction on poverty, hunger, education, gender equality, child mortality, maternal health, disease control, and environmental sustainability. India, given its sheer population, became central to whether the world hit or missed those targets.

Why MDGs mattered for domestic programmes 🔗

The MDGs weren’t just a reporting framework. They reshaped how programmes like rural employment, elementary education, and child nutrition were designed, financed, and evaluated. Indian five-year plans explicitly aligned with MDG targets, and external partners often conditioned support on MDG-linked indicators. This created a feedback loop where global goals influenced national policy, and national results in turn drove global progress reports.

Success stories: where international support moved the needle 🔗

Two flagship programmes illustrate how this partnership worked in practice – one in rural livelihoods, the other in elementary education.

Rural employment and the guarantee revolution 🔗

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), passed in 2005, gave every rural household a legal right to 100 days of wage employment per year. It remains one of the largest social protection programmes ever attempted. In the financial year 2012-13, the scheme cost about ₹397 billion – close to 0.5 percent of India’s GDP – and accrued 2.2 billion workdays, providing employment to nearly every fourth rural household.

International engagement with MGNREGA evolved over time. The World Bank initially criticised the scheme, but evidence of its impact changed the assessment. In 2009, the World Bank called MGNREGA a “barrier to development”, yet by 2014 it described the programme as a stellar example of rural development, reflecting a broader shift in how workfare is viewed globally.

Independent evaluations have helped refine the programme. A World Bank impact evaluation found that the programme didn’t function as designed in the poorest states, and the findings helped local policymakers in Bihar redesign delivery to improve social protection outcomes. Rigorous academic work has also documented welfare gains. Consumption increases in states that implemented the programme intensely turned out to be a multiple of direct income gains, along with measurable increases in adolescent schooling.

The headline numbers are striking. The World Bank’s Global Monitoring Report for 2014-15 on the Millennium Development Goals noted that India was the biggest contributor to poverty reduction between 2008 and 2011, with roughly 140 million people lifted out of absolute poverty, and social welfare programmes including MGNREGA played a central role. More recently, the World Bank’s Spring 2025 Poverty and Equity Brief reported that 171 million people moved out of extreme poverty between 2011-12 and 2022-23, with the rate falling from 16.2 percent to 2.3 percent using the $2.15 per day international line.

Universal primary education and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan 🔗

Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), launched in the early 2000s, became the vehicle for delivering on the constitutional guarantee of free and compulsory education for children aged 6-14. It is one of the largest elementary education programmes anywhere in the world.

International agencies were co-architects of this effort. SSA reaches around 200 million children across more than a million habitations, and between 2001 and the late 2010s the programme brought nearly 20 million children into primary school. Financing was genuinely global. In Phase 1 of SSA from 2003 to 2007, the World Bank invested $500 million, and in Phase 2 from 2007 to 2012 it committed an additional $1.35 billion to expand access to upper primary education, improve retention, and raise learning levels.

UNICEF’s role went beyond financing into design and quality. The agency worked closely with SSA at national and state levels, supporting teacher capacity development and girls’ collectives such as Meena Manch in states like Bihar, West Bengal, and Uttar Pradesh, which helped delay marriage ages and encouraged children to leave work for school.

The results across the country have been substantial. There is now near-universal enrolment in primary education, with most rural children able to reach a primary school within a one-kilometre radius, and the number of out-of-school children has fallen from approximately eight million in 2009 to just over six million in 2014. Net enrolment at the primary level rose from 77 percent in 1991 to 95 percent by 2020, with roughly equal rates among boys and girls.

Health and immunisation wins 🔗

A quieter but equally important partnership unfolded in public health. India, in partnership with UNICEF, the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rotary International, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ran extensive awareness campaigns and house-to-house vaccination drives that led to the country being removed from the list of polio-endemic countries in 2014. This kind of multi-agency collaboration – combining money, science, on-ground logistics, and celebrity endorsement – has become a model for later health campaigns.

Where the record is mixed 🔗

Success stories shouldn’t obscure the harder truths. Progress has been uneven, and some goals proved much more elusive than others.

Health indicators and maternal outcomes 🔗

On the health MDGs, the picture was always bumpier. Progress on improving health indicators related to mortality, morbidity, and environmental determinants has been slow, and even with an extensive menu of government programmes, further intensification of effort and a redesign of outreach strategies are needed to move faster toward MDG-linked health goals. Maternal mortality, child stunting, and anaemia remained stubborn challenges well into the SDG era.

Implementation gaps in flagship schemes 🔗

Even celebrated programmes struggle with delivery. MGNREGA workers face regular payment delays that risk reversing gains made in poverty reduction, and such delays threaten the first Sustainable Development Goal of ‘No poverty’. Budgetary pressures, administrative bottlenecks, and state-level variation have limited the programme’s reach precisely where it is needed most.

Gender remains a structural gap 🔗

Headline employment numbers mask deeper inequalities. The female labour force participation rate stood at 37 percent in rural areas and 19 percent in urban areas per PLFS 2022-23, and the gender gap in paid work remains stark, with 234 million more men employed than women. Without tackling childcare, mobility, and social norms, gains risk being transitory.

Suggestions for enhancing the role of international agencies 🔗

If the next decade is about moving from MDG-era catch-up to SDG-era transformation, the partnership between domestic governments and international agencies needs a rethink. A few directions stand out.

Deepening gender mainstreaming 🔗

Gender cannot sit in a silo. Agencies should push for gender-disaggregated data, gender budgeting across ministries, and programme designs that explicitly account for care work, safety, and economic agency. Embedding gender outcomes into every sector – infrastructure, energy, skilling – is more effective than creating stand-alone women-focused schemes.

Strengthening healthcare systems 🔗

The pandemic exposed how fragile primary healthcare can be. International support is most valuable when it builds permanent system capacity rather than funding one-off campaigns. This means supporting primary care networks, investing in health workforce training, enabling technology transfer for diagnostics and digital health, and strengthening pandemic preparedness and surveillance.

Environmental sustainability and climate action 🔗

Climate change threatens to unravel development gains. Agencies can play an outsized role in facilitating access to clean energy technologies, helping finance climate-resilient infrastructure, supporting sustainable agriculture, and backing adaptation measures for the poorest communities who face the sharpest impacts. Concessional climate finance, delivered at scale and without onerous conditionality, is the test of whether the global partnership is serious.

Rebuilding global partnerships 🔗

The eighth MDG – a global partnership for development – is arguably the foundation for all the others. In a more fragmented geopolitical landscape, international agencies will have to work harder to keep multilateral cooperation alive. This includes protecting space for technical exchange, south-south cooperation, and the kind of long-horizon policy dialogue that survives changes of government.

Better accountability and data 🔗

Stronger monitoring frameworks, independent evaluations, and transparent data sharing should be the default. The MGNREGA experience shows that rigorous impact evaluation – even when initially uncomfortable – leads to better policy. Agencies should invest in domestic evaluation capacity so that course corrections come from within rather than from outside.

Joint efforts as the path forward 🔗

No single agency, national or international, can deliver comprehensive development. The MGNREGA and SSA stories show that when domestic political vision meets international technical and financial support, the combination can move millions of lives. The limits of those same stories – payment delays, quality gaps, stubborn gender divides – show that the partnership has to keep evolving. The current UN Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework for 2023-27 represents the collective offer of UN agencies, funds, and programmes working in partnership with the Government of India on the journey to becoming a ‘Viksit Bharat’ by the centenary of Independence in 2047. Whether that aspiration translates into lived reality will depend on how honestly national and international actors confront the gaps that remain.

What do you think? Do international agencies still have a meaningful role to play in domestic policy-making in an increasingly self-reliant economy, or should their footprint shrink as national capacity grows? And where would you prioritise their support next – health systems, climate adaptation, or something else entirely?

References

1. https://india.un.org/en/about/about-the-un
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304387822000256
3. https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/continuing-relevance-mgnrega
4. https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/sief-trust-fund/brief/an-evaluation-of-indias-national-rural-employment-guarantee-act
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_India
6. https://thediplomat.com/2025/05/is-india-really-winning-its-war-on-poverty/
7. https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/india/brief/educating-india-children
8. https://www.unicef.org/india/what-we-do/education-for-all
9. https://india.un.org/en/171910-education-and-employability
10. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0738059323001475
11. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3180952/
12. https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/rethinking-mgnrega-in-the-post-covid19-era