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Annual Report 2002 : Operational Priorities and Performance
Thematic prioritiesADB worked in 2002 toward integrating into its operations several strategic areas and themes it had adopted in the LTSF: inclusive social development (including gender and development, social protection, participatory development, indigenous peoples, and involuntary resettlement); environmental sustainability; governance and capacity building; regional cooperation; and private sector development. Several other crosscutting themes, also featured in the MDGs, received attention: financial management, information and communication technology, and civil society, including nongovernment organizations (NGOs). Thematic Committees
Ten thematic commitees were formed in 2002 for developing best practices for project operations and formulating guidelines for staff. Each committee and its interdisciplinary network of staff are tasked to encourage professional development and ensure quality output; and consolidate, monitor, and report on the knowledge products and services in the thematic area. The thematic committees and links to their web sites are shown in the box above. Nine sector committees were also formed in 2002 (see discussion on page 52). Poverty continues to plague the Asia and Pacific region, affecting close to 900 million people, or two thirds of the poor in the world. Although much more needs to be done to make the region free of poverty, several DMCs made significant progress in 2002 in reducing poverty and improving the lives of their citizens. Several South Asian DMCs—Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka—completed their poverty analyses in 2002; in the Pacific and Central Asia DMCs, the process is ongoing. Several DMCs also formulated national strategies for reducing poverty after conducting extensive country consultations involving representatives from government, civil society, private sector, and the development community. The consultation process ensured that the voices of the poor were heard, and participation encouraged ownership of the process. Consultations played a role in helping the Government of Papua New Guinea (PNG) formulate its PPA. The Government’s In-House Committee of the Department of National Planning and Rural Development, the Special Committee, and the Poverty Task Force held community-level consultations, workshops, and interviews in 18 communities. The process revealed common perceptions and identified community priorities for poverty reduction, and the participatory approach encouraged PNG ownership of the process and the outputs. In the People’s Republic of China (PRC), ADB-sponsored workshops and training aimed to broaden the skills of government officials and villagers in participatory planning approaches. The PRC Government began testing a participatory strategy involving the poor at the village level to define poverty as they perceive it, and thus combine nonincome with income measures to hone the targeting strategy. Progress was evident in the PRC’s efforts to reduce poverty. Although the number of poor was still large in absolute numbers, in relative terms, the proportion of the poor below the poverty threshold—whether the Government’s poverty line or the international standard of $1 a day earning per person was used—had declined in relative terms. ADB worked closely with its DMCs in 2002 to better understand the causes of poverty and to set goals that can be achieved together (see Box below). ADB also worked closely with its development partners, investing in human and physical capacities that will promote equitable growth, build the skills of people, and help governments function efficiently and prudently. Reducing Poverty in DMCs In the 2002 project pipelines, several developing member countries featured initiatives that will promote increased expenditure on the social sectors within the context of broader economic investment programs. Bangladesh invested in a new social protection program for disadvantaged women and children. India introduced participatory and pro-poor fiscal and administrative reforms to improve provincial-level governance in delivering basic services to the poor and marginalized in Kerala State. Nepal supported six new project proposals over 3 years to increase food security for the poor in the insurgency-challenged rural sector. Pakistan deepened governance reform through the Decentralization Support Program to build the capacity of provincial and local governments in delivering efficient, equitable, and accountable use of public resources to the poor. Sri Lanka helped poor refugees return to their home communities in the aftermath of civil conflict in the northern and eastern parts of the country. Elsewhere in the region, the 2002 initiatives focused on aligning new loan and technical assistance project proposals to country-specific poverty reduction targets as articulated in the poverty partnership agreements (PPAs) (see page 35). In the Mekong countries (Cambodia, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Myanmar, Thailand, and Viet Nam), new road infrastructure and agricultural development investments are designed to link poor communities in the border and remote areas to the mainstream economies. In Southeast Asia, both Indonesia and the Philippines have PPAs that support site-specific poverty reduction initiatives by devolving resources to the local governments. In 2002, implementation of these strategies focused on strengthening the fiscal and institutional capacity of local governments to service loan resources for such projects. Indonesia will strengthen the governance capacity of district governments, while a technical assistance project will develop a modality for onlending concessional and nonconcessional resources to regional governments. A second technical assistance project is setting up a monitoring and evaluation system for assessing the implementation performance of regional governments. In the Philippines, technical assistance was approved for setting up a system for performance-based public resource allocation for local government poverty reduction programs and to test revenue-generating approaches that would allow local governments to sustain projects delivering social services.
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