The governors encouraged Asian Development Bank(ADB) to crowd-in larger private sector financing to support the region’s development, especially, for infrastructure, said ADB President Takehiko Nakao, making the closing address at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Board of Governors in Yohohama recently.
Nakao said they were placing a strong emphasis on public–private partnerships.” In our private sector operations, we plan to expand our guarantee operations, equity investments, and co financing. At the same time, I would like to note that in a way ADB was created to mobilize private sector resources by leveraging our equity to tap capital markets.”
“Many of you stressed the need to scale up ADB’s private sector operations. I assure you that we are deeply committed to increasing our private-sector operations to 25% of regular OCR operations by 2020. In particular, we intend to expand such operations in poorer countries. We are expanding staff resources for our Private Sector Operations Department to facilitate this scale up,” he said.
Nakao said the merger of Asian Development Fund (ADF) lending operations and Ordinary Capital Resources (OCR) balance sheet allows them to further leverage these resources. He said experience in the past 50 years demonstrates that both public and private sector investments by ADB through preparing necessary infrastructure and setting conducive policy environment help crowd-in private sector resources and activities.
The ADB President said they were on track towards meeting the ambitious financing target of $6 billion for climate change by 2020. He also pledged to increase support for universal health coverage, technical and vocational education and training (TVET), and social protection.
Nakao pledged to continue to strengthen co-financing efforts with its private, bilateral and multilateral financing partners, including new institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the New Development Bank.
- ADB also doubled its lending to Sri Lanka in 2017 with an allotment of US$ 800 million.
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