AsDB – sovereign
- Score:
- 85.4
- Position:
- 2 / 10 (Sovereign)
Overview
Asian Development Bank (AsDB) promotes resilience and sustainability across the Asia-Pacific region. Its sovereign portfolio provides non-concessional and concessional loans, grants, and technical assistance to lower and middle-income governments. It engages in projects more directly orientated towards social development and poverty alleviation. AsDB publishes to the IATI Standard. It was established in 1966.
Analysis
AsDB ranked 2nd best overall in the sovereign assessments with a score of 85.4 out of 100. Despite slipping from 1st place in 2023, it achieved an increase in its overall score from 75.9. It dropped to 2nd place in Core Information and 4th in Impact Management, while maintaining 1st in ESG & Accountability to Communities and 2nd in Financial Information. AsDB is an IATI publisher and provides a bulk download for its sovereign activities on its data portal.
AsDB dropped from 1st place to 2nd place in the Core Information component, now scoring 26 out of 30. Despite a drop in ranking, AsDB’s performance across indicators stayed very similar to in 2023. The breadth of information disclosed by AsDB was good and the information disclosed was of high quality and in accessible formats of publication, including to the IATI Standard. As such, AsDB scored at least 50 per cent for every indicator in the component.
In the Impact Management component, AsDB’s sovereign portfolio came 4th with a score of 25.33 out of 30. While it dropped from 3rd place in 2023, its performance across indicators stayed the same. AsDB scored in all five indicators of the component and scored 100 per cent in three out of the five indicators. AsDB published data in the activity indicators/metrics and results indicators, but lost points for not consistently disclosing actual results. It also did not publish its approach to determining impact attribution.
AsDB kept its 1st place position in the ESG and Accountability to Communities component, scoring 25.08 out of 30. AsDB was one of the three sovereign portfolios to score 100 per cent for all organisation-level indicators in this component. This was an improvement from 2023, due to its IAM community disclosure policy. At the project level, it performed relatively well due to its disclosures on summary of E&S risks, E&S project plans/assessments and notably improved its consistency of assurance of community disclosure.
In the Financial Information component, AsDB’s sovereign portfolio ranked 2nd out of 10 with a score of 9 out of 10. It scored 100 per cent on five out of the six indicators, only losing points for not scoring on the currency of investment indicator. It performed very well on the new climate finance indicators, scoring 100 per cent across the board.
Recommendations
- AsDB should review its disclosure policy according to current best practice.
- To achieve full marks for Core Information at the project level, AsDB should add funding source, signature date, last update date, and total investment cost to its bulk download. It should also begin to disclose activity disclosure dates and publish sub-national location and client contact to IATI.
- AsDB should publish its approach to determining impact attribution.
- It should consistently disclose the actual/current value for impact results indicators.
- AsDB should ensure that E&S risk summaries and identified E&S documents are consistently published to IATI.
- For disclosure of assurance of community disclosure (when relevant), it should state what documentation was disclosed, the language of disclosure, and whether the presence of a PGM or IAM was disclosed to project-affected people.
- For Financial Information, AsDB should consistently disclose the currency investments were made in.