Kathmandu, February 1:

Asian Development Bank (ADB) has announced that it would provide financial support to the governments of Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan in a bid to build, strengthen and reform their systems and practices.

According to a report by ADB Nepal Resident Mission, ADB has expressed its confidence that the support would enable the adoption of a result-oriented approach to poverty reduction. The project that is expected to promote the practice of managing development results (MfDR) will get funding from the UK’s Poverty Reduction Cooperation Fund amounting to $1.8 million as technical assistance grant, the report states.

MfDR, adopted by ADB in 2004, is a means of improving planning, monitoring and evaluation of operations to achieve and sustain intended results.

John Samy, deputy director general of ADB’s South Asia Department was quoted as saying in the report that ‘improving development outcomes, as set out in the Millennium Development Goals, is clearly a shared responsibility of developing member countries and their development partners’.

He was further quoted as saying that crucial importance to ADB and other development partners is that, while we build our internal capacity for implementing the MfDR approach, we also develop a similar capacity within our developing member countries. The TA will assess the readiness of the three countries to adopt MfDR practices and then develop an action plan for each. It will also test some readily implementable MfDR initiatives under ADB-financed projects. The participating governments will contribute $100,000 in the form of counterpart staff, office accommodation, and utilities toward the TA’s total cost of $1.9 million.