Currently Asian Development Bank works on elaboration of Strategy 2030 program, which will be released in the coming months.

Banks.am talked to Principal Planning and Policy Specialist at Asian Development Bank (ADB) Jiro Tominaga on cooperation with Armenia and Strategy 2030. The interview took place during the 51st Annual Meeting of ADB’s Board of Governors, which was held at the beginning of May in Manila, Philippines.

About projects with Armenia

Armenia now is categorized as a low-middle income country.

I imagine that until 2030 the country is aspired to go to the next level of upper middle income countries.  I am pretty sure that there a lot of areas, where ADB can work with Armenian government in terms of knowledge and financing.
 
And we are really looking forward to be able to work with Armenian counterparts on both public and private investments. Obviously there are plenty of opportunities.    

I am sure we are already doing this, but we also try to actively look for the opportunities to work with potential Armenian counterparts.


In this strategy we are putting emphasis on public-private partnerships too.

There are a number challenges in the private sector, but the most important part is for sides to meet the internationally accepted standard of dealing with investments. And if we could start to intensify those efforts, I am sure there would be opportunities for us to work together.

Key provisions of ADB new strategy

The work is in draft level now. We put it up on our website for consultation in early April, and the deadline for comment was May 9.  This way we were collecting some comments from external parties (CSO’s, think tanks, etc.). We are going to put up the updated version after the annual meeting, and we are looking to get the final approval by the board at end of July.

In terms of the key features there are a couple of points to note.

Poverty is very important, and we are going to continue to strive to achieve poverty reduction.

In addition to poverty, a number of issues need to be taken into consideration. Our vision is creating more prosperous, inclusive, sustainable and resilient Asia Pacific region.

We are putting more emphasis on private sector development, given that the private sector is actually the engine of growth, creating jobs, sustaining prosperity. We want to expand and diversify our support to develop this sector.

As you may know, a lot of discussions about the huge gap in financing the infrastructure and other areas have been held. And at the same time ADB is such a small financing source compared to the huge gap that is existing. So we’re attaching special importance to how we can mobilize, catalyze particularly the private sector financing.

We also have our special separate chapter on knowledge. We understand that as Asia grows, our value added is not necessarily on the volume of financial support, but the knowledge and expertise that we can combine.

We are also identifying a lot of the issues that are considered as an operational priority like inequality, jobs, social protection. In some Asian countries like India and Philippines there is a huge youth population which needs jobs.

Climate change is a yet another big issue. We also put efforts to the strategy on gender equality, how we can integrate gender aspects in our operations.

Narine Daneghyan talked to Jiro Tominaga