Tokyo, May 2:

After four decades of fighting poverty, the Asian Development Bank(ADB) is considering an ambitious overhaul to try to safeguard its relevance in a rapidly shifting economic landscape.

With extreme poverty expected to have been largely conquered in Asia by the end of the next decade, a key issue for the ADB at its annual meeting this weekend in Kyoto will be how to sharpen its focus to keep up with the times. “The Asian econo-mies are growing quite fast and that means that abso-lute poverty will be substa-ntially reduced by 2020,” ADB president Haruhiko Kuroda said. “But many people would still be stru-ggling to get by on $2 a day even if their incomes rise above dollar-a-day line.”

“And even if income poverty is substantially reduced, child mortality rates, HIV/AIDS, clean water, sanitation - a lot of non-income related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will not be achieved even by 2015 or 2020,” Kuroda said.

An outside panel of experts last month urged the ADB to ‘radically transform itself’.