The year’s Asian Development Bank (ADB) Outstanding Project Implementation Performance Award has been awarded to Microcredit for Women Project and Rural Microfinance Project.

The two were selected out of five teams—Microcredit for Women Project, Upper Sagarmatha Agricultural Development Project, Third Livestock Development Project, Third Road Improvement Project and Rural Microfinance Project. ADB’s Nepal Resident Mission instituted the award in 1996 to encourage project management teams and project staff to excel, in view of their critical role in project implementation.

Richard Vokes, country director, ADB Nepal Resident Mission pointed to poor governance, weak institutional capacity of government institutions, slow implementation of decentralisation policy and lack of involvement of the civil society, private sector and beneficiaries in service delivery as the reasons behind limited impact of development investments in reducing poverty levels. “I would like to request all government officials and beneficiaries to exert continued concerted efforts to address the problems and improve performance of ADB-assisted projects,” he said.

“The mechanism will help provide further opportunity to senior government policy makers to get acquainted with major hurdles affecting project implementation of all ongoing ADB-assisted projects to ensure that necessary remedial measures are taken,”

Vokes pointed out that overall performance of the projects have been adversely affected due to poor quality of civil works, slow decision-making at the department, ministry and cabinet levels, slow implementation of agreed upon policy reforms and delayed compliance with loan effectiveness.

Finance secretary Bimal Prasad Koirala presented the awards to the two projects.