A second risk is that trust funds erode capacity of core health, nutrition, and population staff and weaken accountability mechanisms at the bank. While trust funds do not tend to increase the total amount of funding that sovereign donors give to the bank, their separate approval and allocation processes might increase transaction costs for the bank and recipient countries.2 16 This can erode capacity of bank staff to supervise other country based health projects16 and explains why the bank recently began to charge higher, more consistent fees for trust funds.17 35 The bank’s cost recovery framework (charging higher/consistent fees for trust funds) was initiated to prevent capacity erosion—if it charges consistent overhead costs for each trust fund, it can use this income to hire more staff or pay HNP staff directly for their work on trust funds.