Practice Manager

At the World Bank, a member of the World Bank Group (WBG), you’ll join a diverse, global community working across cultures, disciplines, and borders to address the world’s most pressing development challenges. With 1.2 billion young people reaching working age in the decade ahead, the challenge of job creation has never been greater. Through partnerships across 145 countries and more than 182 offices worldwide, we work with governments, private sector, development partners and other stakeholders to invest in people, strengthen markets, and deliver scalable, data-driven solutions that generate more and better jobs and improve lives. For more information, visit https://www.worldbank.org/en/who-we-are/ibrd VPU Context The World Bank Group (WBG) serves 33 client countries in the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) Region. Clients range from large, rapidly growing, sophisticated middle-income countries to IDA countries, to small Caribbean states, and to one fragile state. To varying degrees, they face three key challenges: low productivity and growth, low-quality jobs, and low resilience to shocks. The region is tackling these challenges with a strong WBG approach, underpinned by selectivity and complementarity between the value added of the public and private arms, and in strong partnership with relevant regional development partners. The challenge of low growth. After recovering lost output, the region is returning to the pre-pandemic scenario of low growth and productivity. After a solid post-pandemic rebound in economic activity (7.2% and 3.9% growth in 2021 and 2022, respectively), GDP growth returned to the pre-pandemic low of around 2.2% in 2023 and 2024, with a medium-term outlook of 2.5%. There are also stark differences in opportunity: a child born today in the poorest 20% in LAC will, on average, be 17 percentage points less productive than a child born in the richest 20%. The challenge of quality jobs. The need for better-quality jobs is paramount. With unemployment at 6.2%, the headline rate masks a deeper issue of job quality. Reflecting stagnating living standards, labor earnings have grown by only 1% or less per year in most countries over the past decade, and some 19% of workers in the region earn income below the poverty line. Investment in foundational infrastructure is critical to job creation. LAC needs to invest at least 3.1% of GDP in infrastructure per year, yet it invests only 2%, significantly lower than the world average of 5.4% of GDP. This underinvestment in physical infrastructure, including in resilient transport, water, and energy, is holding back the potential for better jobs. The region supports clients through selective, transformative infrastructure projects (e.g., urban mobility and regional transport and connectivity). On the human infrastructure challenge, firms in the region continue to cite skills shortages (55% of firms in LAC vs. 45% in middle-income country (MIC) regions) as a key barrier to growth and job creation. A child born in LAC is expected to reach only 56 percent of their productive potential. Three out of four 15-year-olds fail to reach basic math proficiency and cannot read adequately. The region is supporting clients to revamp their education and health care sectors. The LAC region also needs to foster a predictable, business-enabling policy and regulatory environment. This includes ensuring macro stability, eliminating restrictive business regulations in product and factor markets, and improving access to finance, especially long-term capital. Labor market regulations in LAC are noted to be on par with the most restrictive labor market regimes among OECD countries. Further, enforcement of competition policy needs to be supported because of high levels of market concentration in LAC markets. Private capital is needed to support the provision of public goods and investments in key sectors, especially those with the highest potential to enable or create better-quality jobs. However, at only 19.8% of GDP, gross capital formation remains the lowest among all regions (East Asia and Pacific (EAP) is at 38% and South Asia at 30%). Private capital mobilization in the region is being held back by shallow capital markets, lack of long-term finance, high cost of capital, and regulatory and institutional barriers (including in public-private partnership (PPP) frameworks). Based on country contexts, the WBG will support investments in productive clusters (energy/mining, value-added manufacturing, agribusiness, tourism, etc.) across the public-private spectrum. The challenge of vulnerability to shocks. Building countries’ resilience to shocks, including natural disasters, through contingent financing and other innovative risk management platforms at the country and regional levels is critical, given the high exposure to climate-related disasters and natural hazards. Central America and the Caribbean suffer recurrent hurricanes whose impacts on GDP are significantly higher than the regional average. Several countries are experiencing deep, long droughts, increasingly intense storms, and floods that disrupt economic activity and affect livelihoods, with impacts on the most vulnerable populations. The Role of the Prosperity Practice Group The Prosperity Practice Group combines expertise in finance and private sector development, macroeconomics, fiscal policy, taxation, governance, anticorruption, procurement, and poverty, among other areas. The Prosperity program in LAC includes an FY26 lending program of 20 operations totaling over $5 billion in new commitments, an active project portfolio of 41 operations with $11 billion under implementation, and a dynamic program of more than 40 advisory services and analytics (ASA) activities across all Prosperity sectors. Unit Context The Procurement Team for Latin America and the Caribbean is part of the Governance Global Practice within the Prosperity Vice Presidency. The team works across countries ranging fro