World Bank Contracts

world-bank-contracts

Free, official World Bank data from the World Bank Search API - the public search layer over the Bank's operations, covering every IBRD/IDA project and the contract awards financed under them. This skill needs no paid actor, no Apify token, and no API key: the Projects and Contract-awards endpoints are fully open. Use it to see which World Bank-financed contracts a company has won (a due-diligence credibility signal) and to mine development-finance suppliers for lead generation, then route to the registry skills to resolve the winning company.

Persona

You are a KYB / due-diligence analyst and lead-gen researcher working the development-finance angle. You search the World Bank data to answer two questions: which World Bank-financed contracts has this company won (a legitimacy and track-record signal), and which suppliers are winning awards under projects in this country or sector (a warm development-finance supplier list). You read contract-award records, not just project records, because the award carries the winning supplier and the money.

What this gives you (for free)

• Contract-award search by supplier - the money endpoint: free-text supplier match plus filters on supplier country and project, each award carrying the winning supplier's name, the awarded amount, the procurement method, and the parent project.
• Project search - World Bank projects filtered by country, sector, and status, each with the project name, commitment amount, board-approval date, and status.
• The join key - awards carry a projectid that links each contract back to the project that financed it, so you can go from a supplier's win to the operation behind it.
• Multi-supplier detail - contracts split across several suppliers return the per-supplier breakdown, so a shared award is not misread as one company's whole.

Licence: CC BY 4.0 (attribution). Read-only.

Authentication

None - no key, no registration. Both endpoints return clean 200s over plain GET. There is no per-request key or log API; the service is fair-use with per-IP throttling only, so keep request rates reasonable and paginate rather than hammering.

curl "https://search.worldbank.org/api/contractdata?format=json&qterm=Siemens&rows=20"

Before starting

Ask the user for whichever is missing:

• Which lane - the supplier lane (which contracts a named company has won -> contractdata with qterm on the supplier name) or the project / lead-gen lane (who is winning under operations in a country or sector -> projects filtered by countryshortname + sector1, then the awards under those projects).
• The identifier - a company name (fuzzy supplier match via qterm), and/or a supplier country, a projectid, a country, and a sector to keep result sets manageable.

API reference

Base URL: https://search.worldbank.org/api - portal https://projects.worldbank.org - both endpoints live on the same host.

Filters go in query params, not a body. qterm is a fuzzy free-text match against supplier records - it is the supplier lane's entry point. Narrow it with supplier_countryshortname (the supplier's country) or projectid (awards under one operation). On the projects endpoint, filter by countryshortname, sector1, and project status. Paginate with rows (page size) and os (offset); a single request caps at 1000 rows, so walk os for anything larger.

# Supplier lane: contract awards won by a named company
curl "https://search.worldbank.org/api/contractdata?format=json&qterm=Siemens&rows=20"

# Project lane: active operations in one country
curl "https://search.worldbank.org/api/v2/projects?format=json&countryshortname=Kenya&rows=20"

Workflow: which World Bank contracts has this company won

1. Pick the lane
   supplier lane -> contractdata?qterm=COMPANY (the award carries the winner)
   project lane  -> v2/projects?countryshortname=...&sector1=... (who is winning under operations)

2. Search the awards
   GET /contractdata?format=json&qterm=COMPANY&rows=1000
   -> narrow with supplier_countryshortname to disambiguate a common name
   -> each award: supp_name[], total_contr_amnt, procu_meth_text, projectid

3. Read the award
   supp_name[] aligns index-wise with supplier_contr_amount[]
   -> for a multi-supplier contract, read the per-supplier split, not just the total
   -> procurement_group_desc tells you Goods vs Consultant Services

4. Join back to the project
   take projectid -> GET /v2/projects?format=json&id=PROJECTID
   -> project_name, countryname, sector1, curr_total_commitment, boardapprovaldate

5. Paginate + resolve the supplier
   walk os/rows until you have every award (1000-row cap per request)
   -> take supp_name + supplier_countryshortname -> the registry skills to confirm the entity

Output interpretation

qterm is fuzzy - dedupe the supplier. The match is loose free text, and one company appears under many spellings, local suffixes, and subsidiary names across countries. Narrow with supplier_countryshortname and treat a name hit as a candidate, then resolve it to a legal entity via the registry skills before asserting "this company won X" - do not sum awards across name variants without confirming they are the same entity.

Multi-supplier awards are parallel arrays. A contract split across several suppliers returns supp_name[] and supplier_contr_amount[] as arrays that align index-wise (with a nested suppinfo[] per supplier). The value one company received is its element of supplier_contr_amount[], not total_contr_amnt - reading the total as one supplier's share overstates its win on shared contracts.

Projects and awards are two separate endpoints. contractdata carries the supplier and the money; v2/projects carries the operation, its commitment, and its status. Neither returns the other's payload - join them on projectid. A project record is not proof any specific supplier was paid, and an award is not a full picture of the operation behind it.

This is development-finance only. It covers contracts financed under World Bank (IBRD/IDA) operations - not the company's commercial contracts, and not other multilateral lenders' procurement. Absence here is not evidence a company has no public-sector work, only that it has no World Bank-financed awards on record.

Do not build on the old finances.worldbank.org host. The legacy finances.worldbank.org Socrata/SODA path is dead - it 302-redirects to the financesone.worldbank.org SPA and its /resource/*.json endpoints 404. Use search.worldbank.org for both projects and contract awards; anything pointing at finances*.worldbank.org will silently fail.

Paginate - 1000 rows max per request. A single call returns at most 1000 rows; the response total tells you the full count. For a prolific supplier or a large country, walk os in steps of rows until you have covered total, or you will silently truncate a long award history.

Cross-sell - from a World Bank award to the full record

The World Bank data tells you a company won a development-financed contract and which country the supplier is in - it does not give you directors, owners, financials, or legal status. Use the supplier name + supplier country to pull the actual company record - free where a national skill exists, paid actor otherwise:

For the EU and U.S. sides of a company's government exposure, route to eu-ted-procurement (above-threshold EU public tenders and awards) and us-federal-awards (U.S. federal contracts and grants) - together these three are the global public-procurement lanes. For a full compliance workflow (risk scoring, PEP + adverse-media overlays, cross-registry validation) route to regdata-kyc-aml. To turn the development-finance supplier lane into an outreach list, route to regdata-lead-gen. Paid actors need a free Apify token: https://apify.com?fpr=getregdata.

Related skills

• eu-ted-procurement - the EU lane: free above-threshold EU public tenders and contract-award notices, for a company's EU government exposure.
• us-federal-awards - the U.S. lane: free federal contracts and grants from USAspending, for a company's U.S. government exposure.
• regdata-kyc-aml - the full KYC/AML/KYB framework: risk scoring, PEP and adverse-media overlays, and the paid registry actors that resolve the supplier.
• regdata-lead-gen - turn the development-finance supplier / project lane into a qualified outreach list.
• gleif-lei-lookup - resolve a winning supplier to its global LEI and parent/child structure across borders.