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Add to Preferred SourcesSri Lanka’s President Mr. Maithripala Sirisena made his first visit to the Asian Development Bank (ADB) headquarters while conducting a state visit to the Philippines and met with ADB President Mr. Takehiko Nakao.
During the visit, Mr. Sirisena and Mr. Nakao discussed development challenges faced by Sri Lanka and ADB’s role in helping address them and signed three loan agreements totaling $455 million for projects in higher education and transport as well as a technical assistance loan in the urban sector.
This year, ADB’s total commitment to Sri Lanka, including these three loans, will amount to $815 million. ADB will continue to maintain a strong pipeline of projects totaling about $800 million a year in the current Country Partnership Strategy (CPS), 2018–2022, compared with $500 million a year in the previous CPS period.
“Sri Lanka highly values the assistance provided by ADB to various development plans of our country,” said Mr. Sirisena. “The economic cooperation extended by ADB is of extreme benefit to the countries grappling with development issues.”
Mr. Nakao commended Mr. Sirisena on Sri Lanka’s achievements in reducing poverty to low single digits and improving human development. Building on its achievements so far, Sri Lanka needs to seek higher growth to achieve the goal of becoming an upper middle-income country by 2025.
The three loans signed are: (i) $145 million for a project to support the development of science and technology faculties in four universities to nurture a new breed of technology-oriented graduates; (ii) $300 million to finance construction of about 5.3 kilometers of an elevated toll highway to link Colombo’s international port with the country’s expressway network; and (iii) a $10 million technical assistance loan to finance the establishment of a facility that will help improve the design and implementation of urban projects in Sri Lanka.
Original source: ADB
Published on 17 January 2019