Helping to build country institutional capacity is at the heart of the World Bank’s mission to promote sustainable development and poverty reduction. Greater integration of project management in a country’s existing institutions and systems is important to this goal, and to the Bank’s effort to move toward greater use of country systems in lending. The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness adopted at the High-Level Forum in March 2005 reaffirmed the donor community’s commitment to align their programs to national development strategies, institutions, and procedures. It identified a reduction in the number of parallel project implementation units (PIUs).
