Articles

Kamal Kar is a specialist in livestock production, agriculture and natural resources who has developed innovative approaches in natural resources management and low-cost farming technologies.

Nonrevenue water in urban Asia

Nonrevenue water (or NRW) is a critical benchmark and a good indicator of water utility performance. In most developing countries, NRW levels remain high and are indicative that the water utilities suffer from poor operational and financial performance - a situation that contributes to lack of investment in infrastructure and utility capacity.

Engineer Christine Acosta is a leak detective which involves listening to water flows in the pipe system to determine the location of leakages to help reduce the water utility's nonrevenue water and increase water efficiency.

In the hands of the right people and applied at the right time, knowledge can stimulate action and propel development. Strategy 2020, the Asian Development Bank's long-term strategic framework, recognizes this and underlines knowledge solutions as a driver of change in this decade.

Aided by investments in skill transfers, irrigation, and road upgrades, villagers in the Lao highlands now have the knowledge to improve their farming and marketing techniques, connecting them to markets as far away as Japan.

Pak Xong - Signs of modernity have come to these hardscrabble hills in southern Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR). Satellite dishes peek out from behind stilted homes. The chirp of mobile phones breaks the quiet as farmers take calls from traders provinces away.

Though a hydropower project relocated villagers, it also brought electricity, roads, and schools to a remote valley.

Phon Sa-On Resettlement Village, Nakai Province - Kai Kensavaong will never again walk the muddy lanes of her birth village. Her old home is beneath a reservoir of caramel-brown water.

"I'll never forget that place," said the 41-year-old villager, her lips dyed pink from chewing betel nut. "It was my home. I picked my first bamboo stalks there."

Innovative partnerships to combat the spread of HIV infection in Papua New Guinea are tackling a lack of provincial capacity as well as risky behaviors and gender inequality.

Western Highlands, Papua New Guinea - Missionary nun Rose Bernard runs the Shalom Center, an HIV testing and counseling center in Banz, a market town in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG).

Enticed by the historic province's modern industrial status, Cavite's blue-collar workers are finding affordable, attractive housing in an ADB-funded project.

General Trias, Cavite - Once the cradle of the Philippine revolution, the province of Cavite has become part of a different type of mass movement, as droves of blue collar workers head there in search of jobs and affordable housing.

With new roads, rural people who live in the world's highest mountain range can access markets and increase their incomes.

Baglung, Nepal - A Nepali geographer once observed that if it were possible to flatten all the mountains in his homeland, the country would be larger than the People's Republic of China.

The farmers, traders, and workers who live in those hills hardly need a scientist's insight to know that they live in impossibly rugged territory. They experience it every day.

A new regional railway brings hope for growth to Cambodians, and reminds older Cambodians of prosperous times before recent decades of conflict.

Pursat, Cambodia - Cambodia's rail lines tell the story of the country's turbulent history. In Pursat, grandmother Uch Thorn remembers back to the 1950s and 1960s, when she was a young woman, and giant steam engines rumbled past her village.

"Back then the rail service was good. Lots of people traveled on the trains, and we had nice stations," says Thorn.