What We Learned from a Year of Turning Knowledge into Impact

In 2025 alone, we produced over 700 new knowledge products. Our publications were accessed more than 5 million times worldwide, with 61% of policymakers across Latin America and the Caribbean accessing our work, showing our leadership in the region. Our authors received more than 34,000 citations, and our work was referenced in more than 1,500 policy documents. More than 112,000 people participated in our online courses. Over 1,000 government officials engaged in our Regional Policy Dialogues. These numbers reflect a sustained institutional commitment to the idea that knowledge is not a complement to development work. It is the foundation of it. But scale alone is not the measure of impact.

The moments we find most meaningful are those when analytical work helped open a door that had been stuck in the policy process.

In Argentina, our microsimulations helped identify that energy subsidies worth $10 billion a year were disproportionately benefiting higher-income households. Working alongside ministries and other multilateral organizations, that analysis helped inform a reform path that protected the most vulnerable while generating fiscal savings of 1.3% of GDP. The evidence was one piece of a much larger puzzle that combined leadership, deep collaborations, institutional capacity, and sustained technical engagement.

In Lima, our evaluation of public transit investments found meaningful improvements in access to employment and income, particularly for women in peripheral areas. What we learned there informed us how to approach the next generation of urban mobility projects across the region, from safety features in metro cars to skills training integrated into project safeguards, ensuring that lessons traveled across operations rather than remaining isolated in a single evaluation.

In Mexico, years of analytical engagement on labor and pension systems eventually fed into two waves of structural reforms. What that experience taught us is that the knowledge-to-policy journey rarely moves in a straight line. Sustained presence, trust built over time, and the willingness to stay in the room across political transitions matter as much as the quality of the research itself in shaping durable reform.

This year, we began calculating a Knowledge Influence Index that goes beyond counting how much knowledge we produce to understand its influence. The index looks at where our research shows up: in online news, academic citations, policy documents, and even in the Bank’s own operations. In other words, it helps us move from measuring output to measuring influence — and encourages teams across the IDB Group to design knowledge with real policy and operational impact in mind.

The index rose between 2020 and 2022 and then declined more recently. Part of this pattern reflects the extraordinary surge of COVID-19 research during the pandemic, when governments and institutions were urgently seeking evidence and policy guidance. As that demand faded, so did some of the attention around pandemic-related research. But the trend also reflects broader changes in how knowledge circulates today — from shifting policy priorities to the rapid rise of AI tools that reshape how information is discovered and consumed. These shifts reinforce an important lesson: producing strong research is only part of the equation; ensuring that knowledge is visible, discoverable, and connected to decision-making is just as critical.

Encouragingly, external surveys of policymakers point in the same direction: in a recent ODI Global survey of government officials across 120 countries, the IDB Group ranked first among multilateral development banks in generating research and analysis, and among the top three in providing policy advice and technical assistance.

In 2025, we put in place several reforms that we believe will compound over time and better connect evidence to operational decision-making:

• The Knowledge Advisory Committee now brings together senior leadership from across IDB, IDB Invest, and IDB Lab to coordinate our knowledge agenda and ensure quality at the highest institutional level.
• The Development Effectiveness Intelligence Fund invested $8 million in 2025 to support rigorous impact evaluations. Between 2009 and 2025, only 42% of planned evaluations were completed. We are determined to raise that number so that more lessons are generated and reintegrated into new projects.
• Our AI-powered tool Seek now lets users pose questions and receive answers drawn from thousands of peer-reviewed IDB publications at once, dramatically lowering the barrier to accessing evidence for policymakers and practitioners who need timely, actionable insights.
• The Knowledge Influence Toolkit is helping our teams think more deliberately about who needs to see their research and how to reach them, shifting from a publish-and-hope approach to genuine audience engagement aligned with policy windows and reform processes.

These reforms led to our receiving the International Knowledge Management Award last year, providing meaningful external validation of the direction we are heading. 

This first Knowledge Annual Report is, in many ways, a document of accountability to ourselves. It shows what we produced, how it was used, and where the gaps remain. But the honest conclusion of this report is not one of satisfaction. It is one of momentum. We know that knowledge not used is an opportunity lost. We know that evaluations not completed are lessons not learned. We know that evidence not reaching decision-makers is a gap we still need to close.

What drives us is a simple belief: the knowledge we generate today can shape policy decisions tomorrow, and those decisions will improve lives across Latin America and the Caribbean. The work in this report shows that this is not an aspiration. It is something we have done, and something we intend to keep doing, with more rigor, more reach, and more urgency, as we continue strengthening the IDB Group’s role as a Knowledge Bank for the region.