ISLAMABAD: The Asian Development Bank (ADB) will provide about $5.4 billion assistance to Pakistan over the next three years.

This is part of the ADB’s five-year Country Partnership Strategy (CPS).

“The indicative resources available for commitment during the first three years of the CPS period (2021-2023) total $5.4bn,” said the ADB on Thursday. This include $3.6bn for regular OCR (ordinary capital resource) lending and $1.8bn for concessional OCR lending.

Pakistan is classified as a group B category developing member country with access to OCR lending and concessional OCR lending. The bank said additional grant resources had been allocated for a project in 2021 from the Asian Development Fund thematic pool worth $5 million to increase gender equity.

The final allocation for the complete 5-year CPS period will depend on available resources, project readiness, and the outcome of the country’s performance assessments. Sovereign operations will be supplemented with ADB’s non-sovereign operations, subject to headroom constraints, as well as official and commercial co-financing.

The existing cost-sharing and financing parametres will continue to be applied during 2021-2025, with ADB financing up to 85 per cent of the loan project costs and 90pc for the TA costs, on an overall portfolio-wide basis. Actual shares for specific ADB projects will be determined by project-specific considerations and available co-financing.

The bank said it would place special emphasis on improving the quality of project readiness and implementation by engaging with the government to have project management units early. Only procurement-ready projects will be taken to the ADB board of directors for consideration of approval.

Published in Dawn, January 29th, 2021