1st Twinning Regional Forum
Opening Speech by
Hun Kim
Director, South Asia Urban Development Division
Asian Development Bank
Water Utilities Meet
10 February 2009
Daejeon, Korea
Good morning everyone and welcome to the regional forum of twining partners. And I hope those participants especially from the warm climate are doing well despite the cold weather since your arrival in Inchon. Actually, the weather is quite warm and nice for a typical winter day. It could have been much colder. And it is not quite likely to have snow this week, so I heard.
And all the participants would agree with me that K-Water has been a wonderful host from arranging the airport pickup to managing all the logistics to the details. We also feel lucky to hold this first meeting of twining partners here in Daejon, home of K-water and a city known for hospitality and kindness of its people in Korea. In this connection, I would like to thank our host, Mr. Kim Keun-Ho, President of K-Water who is with us this morning despite his busy schedule. Mr. President, we are genuinely impressed by professional support by K-water academy and the excellent facility made available to us for this Forum.
The forum participants represent more than 10 countries, including Bhutan, Cambodia, India, Malaysia, Maldives, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Viet Nam, Thailand, Australia, and the USA. And of course, the republic of Korea. Some of us are here as receiving partners and others as expert partners. But we have a common objective to benefit from each other's experiences and deliver better services to our clients.
I would also like to acknowledge the presence of USAID, ADB's partner in this endeavor with whom we have agreed to coordinate and share our twining programs. ADB and USAID have also joined hands to host a common website which we call Waterlinks.
As you all know, water has become an important global agenda in the twenty first century. For instance, some of you might have read in the newspapers about the recent discussion in the World Economic Forum in Davos. Together with unfolding financial and economic crisis, a serious concern was raised that the world is heading towards "water bankruptcy" as water has been consistently under-priced in many regions and has been wasted and overused.
The prospect is even more worrisome in Asia which is the home of the world's two most populous countries, India and China. We know that in these gigantic countries water is already an issue of national security without which their people and economy may not sustain the needed economic growth to lift its vast population out of poverty.
And in many parts of Asia, people still get water only a couple of hours a day. Even when piped water is available, the quality is in doubt and people get sick and children die. If we add the status of sanitation to this, the picture is even more depressing.
ADB is a development bank. We help our member countries produce and supply energy, and move people and resources around for economic growth. But water is also on the top of our agenda. In 2006, ADB launched a 5-year Water Financing Program that aims to double water investments and improve services to more than 300 million people in the Asia-pacific region. But our experience shows that it is not necessarily the scarcity of water resources which causes inadequate supply of drinking water. It is more the problem of inefficiency and poor management of the utilities and local governments. In some of our projects, building additional treatment plans failed to bring the anticipated improvements in water supply as the critical issue of non-revenue water was not tackled properly in the beginning. Many options have been suggested and tried including various forms of public private partnerships. The results are mixed. Recently ADB's own review also suggested public-public partnership and promotion of knowledge sharing within the Asia region.
Twining is one such improvement strategy. It offers the insights that cannot be easily obtained through conventional sources such as consultants from developed countries and training events outside the region. It also provides opportunities for the regional utilities to forge a longer-term relationship and trust for future cooperation and business. ADB hopes to play the role of an honest broker so that a successful twining will bring more regional cooperation and business based on trust.
I am looking forward to the discussions and exchanges this week. This is also a great opportunity personally to observe what K-water is doing and how. Last November, in Nanjing World Urban Forum, the presentation made by K-Water attracted so much interest because of the unique partnership adopted by K-water with local governments. We all expect to take away from this Forum, such ideas and new proposals, to enrich our knowledge base, strengthen partnerships and deliver the results for our clients.
So let's be open, awake and active in our discussions and most of all, enjoy this experience of mutual learning. Thank you very much for listening.
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