Governance Cooperation Fund

Governance Cooperation Fund - GCF
Updated: 22 August 2008

The Governance Cooperation Fund supports government-led governance reform activities that can be shown to clearly and concretely improve transparency, accountability, predictability and/or participation.

ADB established GCF in November 2001 as a multi-donor umbrella facility to finance a program of activities that falls within the scope of ADB's Good Governance Policy (1995) and Promoting Good Governance: Medium-Term Agenda and Action Plan (2000).

The Fund was originally established through an untied grant contribution from the Government of Canada in 2001. Since then, the Governments of Ireland, Denmark, and Norway have made contributions to support GCF.

Based on the findings of the review of the GCF undertaken in late 2005, GCF was refocused in 2007 to prioritize direct support for the implementation of ADB's Second Governance and Anticorruption Action Plan.

The refocused GCF will now be implemented through a regional technical assistance – RETA 6445: Support for Implementation of the Second Governance and Anticorruption Action Plan (Financed by the Governance Cooperation Fund) [ PDF: 131kb | 16 pages ], which was approved in February 2008. The regional technical assistance will distribute $2.6 million over the next three years.

RETA 6445 supports the following outputs – Output 1: Preparation of risk assessments and risk mitigation plans for projects in ADB priority sectors; Output 2: Subprojects addressing risk mitigation measures at country, sector, or project level in priority areas for ADB operations; Output 3: Subprojects addressing knowledge dissemination and monitoring; and Output 4: Provision of long-term national governance consultants to Resident Missions.

Subproject proposals to address outputs 2 and 3 above will be submitted by ADB regional departments and Resident Missions to the Capacity Development and Governance Division (RSCG) for subproject funding. The Guidelines for Subprojects [ PDF: 85kb | 20 pages ] provide ADB staff with information on the preparation and submission of applications for subproject funding under RETA 6445.

For more information, read the GCF Board Paper [ PDF: 51kb | 16 pages ], Review of the GCF 2006 [ PDF: 276kb | 66 pages ] and Review of the GCF 2003 [ PDF: 116kb | 15 pages ].