Côte d'Ivoire's growth isn't reaching poor people — and the World Bank now knows why

Côte d'Ivoire has grown faster than most African countries since 2011, but poverty has barely budged. The problem isn't growth itself — it's that workers lack the skills and tools to turn that growth into better jobs, so each percentage point of GDP growth reduces poverty by less than half the global average.

This is a measurement of a structural mismatch that most development programs have ignored. The World Bank and other agencies have spent decades assuming that if you grow the economy, poverty follows automatically — money trickling down through jobs. This paper shows the mechanism is broken in at least one country that looked like it was doing everything right. What matters is whether development banks now start funding workforce capacity — literacy, technical training, tools — before funding growth initiatives, or whether they keep assuming the trickle-down story works.