News and Events

Doubling Water Financing and Results
Conference on ADB's Water Financing Program 2006-2010

Water is central to human existence. It is also a key factor in reducing poverty, improving livelihoods, and promoting economic growth. Yet, investments to provide people with safe drinking water and decent toilet facilities, to allocate and preserve water resources, and to properly manage wastewater have fallen seriously behind demands. In 2002, about 700 million people in the Asia-Pacific region were still without safe water supplies and some 2 billion had inadequate or no toilet facilities.

A minimum of US$8 billion per year will be needed over the next decade just to meet Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets for safe drinking water and sanitation.¹ Additional investments are needed for irrigation services, river basin management, flood management and mitigation, and wastewater management to ensure the future of this precious resource.

Clearly, this is a major challenge, and one that is complicated by a wide range of governance, institutional, social, environmental and political issues. To address these problems, ADB announced that it will double its investments in water operations through the new Water Financing Program (WFP) 2006-2010, which will focus on the delivery of substantial investment, reform, and capacity development in three key areas: rural water services, urban water services, and river basin water management.

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• Advance the implementation of Water Financing Program (WFP) approved by ADB management in March 2006.
• Provide ADB staff and key decisionmakers from ADB developing member countries (DMCs) the opportunity to discuss
1. barriers to water investment
2. practical solution strategies to overcome water programming barriers
3. ADB products and services that help implement the solutions and strategies
4. opportunities for water investments

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The following outputs were delivered at the end of the event:

• For the country delegates - opportunities and ideas for investments can be inputs to their respective country's public water investment plans, which considers applying the latest water reform, capacity development, and investment products and services facilitated by ADB.

• For ADB - inputs to enhance forward investment and technical assistance planning plus feedback on how to improve the attractiveness, effectiveness, and responsiveness of ADB's range of products and services for water investments.

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• This was a 2-day event that ran over 3 days.

• It involved short plenary style sessions to discuss barriers and solutions across countries, followed by breakout sessions to discuss country-specific barriers, solutions, and action plans.

• To ensure meaningful country dialogues, the ADB Operations Departments, headed by their respective country directors, led the breakout sessions with their DMC counterparts.

• The program also incorporated a knowledge component, including country-specific presentations.

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The conference brought together central and line agency high-level representatives who were in positions to make water outcomes possible.

Participants from five of the six WFP target countries—India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Philippines, and Viet Nam—attended the conference. Delegates included experts on urban, rural, and basin subsectors, and finance and planning ministry officials.

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• Water Financing Program
• Water Brief: Water Financing Program

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