Joint Nepal Government and Asian Development Bank Country portfolio review workshop kicked off today at Godavari. Speaking at the inaugural program, finance secretary Suman Sharma stressed the need to improve the current level of expenditure.

Participated by representatives from various ministries and ADB’s senior officials from Manila, the participants will discuss various issues regarding on-going ADB projects.

“Nepal has made certain progress but we need to take drastic steps to improve the situation. We need more focused in project implementation,” said secretary Sharma.

Addressing the workshop, Diwesh N. Sharan, deputy director General South Asia Department of ADB, said that Nepal needs to address the huge infrastructure gap, by substantially increasing infrastructure investments from the present level of just about 4 percent of GDP to 8-12 percent GDP.

“Nepal’s capital spending is still not up to the mark. Obviously, this is reflected in ADB portfolio as well. At the end of 2014, Nepalese ongoing portfolio is almost $1.8 billion. However, as much as 50 percent of the portfolio is yet to be contracted and 69 percent undisbursed,” said Sharan.

Addressing the inaugural program, Kenichi Yokoyama, country director of ADD Resident Mission, said that the CPRM will review ABD’s project portfolio performance, and identify key issues and specific actions to be taken to improve the performance.  In light of ADB’s performance based ADF allocation policy, we informed that the ADF allocation may be substantially reduced from the 2013-2014 level, $327 million per year. However, I am glad to inform that the performance rating was 4.5 percent in FY 2014 and, we can now reasonably expect the similar level of allocation during 2015-2016 period,” said ADB country director Kenichi.

Four projects were also received award by performing best in the year 2013-014. Those includes Raising income of Small and Medium farmers, sub regional Transport facilitation project, Second Small Towns Water and Sanitation Sector Project, High Mountain Agribusiness and Livelihood project, South Asia Tourism Infrastructure Development Project.