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p. 3 of 5 BACK | NEXT Reorganization Designed to Improve ADB's Effectiveness Reorganization to Benefit Country Operations Regional and Sustainable Development Department: A Knowledge Center Five Regional Departments Improve Country Focus What the Reorganization Means for Developing Member Countries

ADB Reorganization

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Regional and Sustainable Development Department: A Knowledge Center

Over the years, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has adopted many policies and strategies to enhance the impact of its assistance. The Regional and Sustainable Development Department (RSDD) is helping ensure that ADB effectively implements these policies and guidelines to maintain the highest quality of development assistance.

“RSDD is leading the initiative of making ADB a knowledge institution. This is a heavy responsibility and a major challenge,” says Akira Seki, RSDD Director General.

The new department is a center of sector and thematic expertise, supporting all other departments in ADB. It develops policies and guidelines, and monitors their implementation to ensure bankwide consistency. It is also a center for compliance oversight, monitoring compliance with sector and thematic policies in general and ADB’s safeguard policies in particular. The safeguard policies include policies on the environment, resettlement, and indigenous peoples.

“The regional departments are primarily responsible for quality,” says Mr. Seki. “The job of RSDD is to support, guide, and advise them, and of course, finally to assure Management of quality.”

The new department has six units. The Environment and Social Safeguard Division ensures compliance with ADB’s safeguard policies. Two divisions are responsible for ADB’s thematic agenda—the Poverty Reduction and Social Development Division and the Governance and Regional Cooperation Division. To oversee the implementation of ADB’s technical and sectoral agenda, RSDD has the Finance and Infrastructure Division and the Agriculture, Natural Resources and Social Sectors Division. The Department also houses ADB’s Nongovernment Organization (NGO) Center, which coordinates ADB’s links with NGOs.

RSDD helps ADB’s five regional departments improve the quality of their work by developing best practices for project operations and formulating guidelines for staff. It consolidates short- and medium-term sector work programs and maintains a database on each sector and thematic area. RSDD establishes and manages both internal and external sectoral and thematic networks to enable all ADB staff to benefit from an exchange of knowledge and experience within the organization and in the development community at large.

RSDD supports ADB’s regional development functions, including ADB’s efforts to link the Asian and Pacific region to global networks and partnerships for development.

“Regional cooperation is a clear comparative advantage of this Bank. In RSDD, ADB has a focal point for this critical mandate,” says Mr. Seki.

In consultation with the new regional departments, RSDD helps implement the regional cooperation strategy that ADB is in the process of developing. The strategy will help strengthen ADB’s regional focus and operations and its linkages with regional institutions; establish ADB as a knowledge catalyst and a recognized regional center for development; and cultivate and strengthen ADB’s role in linking the region to global networks and partnerships.

At the subregional level, the five regional departments are responsible for all regional cooperation activities. RSDD only gets involved when its help is needed for subregional work that crosses the geographical lines between two or more regional departments.

RSDD promotes links at a technical level with other multilateral bodies on thematic and sectoral issues, but cooperation at the institutional level continues to be the responsibility of ADB’s Strategy and Policy Department.

RSDD is playing a key role in the reorganized ADB. It is helping ADB maintain the highest standards of excellence in its fight to reduce poverty in the region.

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