ADB’s two-day meeting with govt starts today

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) would hold a meeting with government entities today to review its 48 ongoing projects worth nearly $10 billion, aiming to remove implementation hurdles, officials said on Monday.
They said the Economic Relations Division (ERD), the ADB, and the government's project implementing agencies would begin the two-day Tripartite Portfolio Review Meeting (TPRM) in Dhaka to expedite the implementation of the "problematic" and "slow-moving" projects.
The meeting, which will include representatives from several implementing agencies, aims to resolve long-standing issues, such as procurement delays, land acquisition hurdles, and slow fund disbursements.
"We will sit with the ADB and project implementing agencies for the two-day review meeting to expedite project execution and resolve implementation problems," a senior ERD official told The Financial Express.
He said some projects had been struggling for many years due mainly to start-up delays, land acquisition, and procurement complexities, which would be focused on at the meeting.
ADB's Regional Head (Operations Coordination Unit) Mr Bouadokpheng Chausabat, ERD Secretary Md Shahriar Kader Siddiky, and ADB Country Director in Bangladesh Hoe Yun Jeong will be present at the meeting to be held at the Bangladesh-China Friendship Conference Centre.
The primary goal of the high-level meeting is to ensure that the current portfolio of the ADB-assisted projects stays on track to meet development targets.
"We will mainly try to identify bottlenecks like administrative and technical challenges for slow-moving projects, devise time-bound solutions, and assign responsibilities to relevant agencies to ensure the upcoming pipeline projects meet all the readiness criteria before loan signing and improve the fund use capacity," said the ERD official.
Transport remains the centrepiece of ADB's support, aimed at turning Bangladesh into a regional logistics hub.
A significant shift in the 2025-26 portfolio is the move toward policy-based lending, which provides budget support in exchange for institutional reforms.