Helping the poor, helping nations

Among the international lending institutions that have reached out to the Philippines, the Asian Development Bank is perhaps seen as the least invasive in the country’s affairs. But neither is it seen as having a big impact, even if its main office is located here.

Over the last five decades, ADB has summed up its grants and loans to the Philippines at $18 billion, with an average lending of $767 million over the last 10 years. It prides itself with being one of the Philippines’ largest sources of official development assistance.

Yet, ask the man on the street about what he would associate ADB with, and the answer would likely be about that guarded elite sprawling complex at the Ortigas commercial district adjacent to SM Megamall – and the recent traffic generated during the 51st ADB Annual Board of Governors’ meeting.

It would definitely be news to most Filipinos that the ADB wielded a decisive hand in expanding the country’s irrigation systems in the late 1960s when less than 10 percent of our rice fields had accessible farmland water sources.

The ADB’s work in the 1970s to speed up rural infrastructure development in Mindanao would also be something that needs to be imprinted in the Filipinos’ collective memory. But who remembers ADB assistance for hydroelectric power plants, or irrigation systems, or farm-to-market roads in Mindanao during those days?

There’s even that push between the ADB and our government in 1981 to bring electricity to the countryside, more specifically 590,000 households, and the establishment of small hydropower-generating systems in the remote parts of the country.

Just about anything

It does seem that since the Philippines first let out a plea for help in 1966, the ADB had come to the rescue in just about anything – from accelerating spending on infrastructure, human capital, providing social protection to the country’s most vulnerable people, reforming tax policy and administration, reducing red tape, and promoting the ease of doing business.

In fact, in more recent years, the ADB claims to have helped reform the government’s poorly managed finances towards health, the proof of such mentoring being the investment upgrades by international rating agencies in recent years.

The ADB also lays claim to supporting the public-private partnership (PPP) agenda that was started in previous administrations, but from which many of the ongoing mega infrastructure projects had been processed and are ongoing.

The bank was particularly proud of the first PPP project where it was able to devise a financing plan for the private sector to rehabilitate and expand the North Luzon Expressway. Now a near world-class thoroughfare, the memories of a badly maintained NLEX tollway system have all but receded deep in our awareness.

Not widely known too, despite the 3.5 million families in its enrolment, is the ADB’s support for the government’s conditional cash transfer program; this is said to have brought down our poverty incidence to 21.6 percent in 2015 from 25.2 percent in 2012.

And more importantly, in the current administration’s Build Build Build program, 12 of the major infrastructure projects under transportation, water, utilities, and urban infrastructure subsectors worth $4.442 billion is financed through the ADB.

Elusive inclusive growth

But still, one may ask, despite all the billions of dollars of ADB money spent and with over 50 years of cooperation, inclusive growth for over 50 percent of the country’s poor, or a staggering 50 million of our countrymen, continue to be elusive and out of reach.

Elementary school student Era Marie Vargas from Bohol, a recipient of the ADB-supported conditional cash transfers, attributes her being an honor student to the money her family received, and in turn, was used to support her studies. But Era Marie is an exception to the thousand others not reached by any government or ADB-funded programs.

Like many organizations involved in development work, expecting miracles is farthest from the mind. For the ADB, with so many countries to work with, and so many lives involved, financial and human resources are always constrained.

Toss in the need to work for a sustainable world that recognizes the need to cut down on emission gasses which is at odds with the goal of bringing cheap electricity to the remote ends of the world where the poor and underprivileged live.

Strategy 2030

The ADB has drafted its direction in the coming years, calling it Strategy 2030, which was presented during the recent Board of Governors’ meeting with member countries and civil society organizations.

It will continue to toe the development line of inclusive growth, especially for its developing country members, but with a promise of improvement in the delivery of assistance in light of changes and new trends that would affect Asia’s future.

Strategy 2030 is also expected to draw from the lessons of Strategy 2020, and from the way it looks, would lean more on holding hands with the private sector in accomplishing the gargantuan task set by international community regarding Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

No mean task, it is turning out, and while civil society continues to put in heroic hours and effort in helping save and uplift lives, the ADB and even its private sector partners can only do so much.

In the end, governments and its people must put in the most effort to chart their future from poverty, climate change and natural disasters.

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