The Director-General, Nigeria Country Department, African Development Bank, Mr. Lamin Barrow, says that 32 per cent of flagged project operations, meant to be financed by the bank, failed to meet loan effectiveness and first disbursement conditions as of December 2021.
He said this at the 2022 Country Portfolio Performance Review Workshop in Abuja on Thursday.
Barrow said, “Despite the progress made in the past year, we need to move fast in ensuring that the new projects reach implementation stage at a faster pace.
“Admittedly, start-up delays – attributed to delays in meeting loan effectiveness and first disbursement conditions – accounted for 32 per cent of flagged operations as at end December 2021. There are low-hanging fruits that we can pluck by moving faster in processing the signature of 4 public sector projects approved in 2021.”
According to him, there have been some increases, however, in the pace of project implementation since 2019.
“This difficult operating environment notwithstanding, there has been some modest gains since the last CPPR. For instance, the pace of project implementation has picked up in 2021 as evidenced in the cumulative disbursement rate, which increased from 57 per cent in 2019 to 66 per cent in 2021.
“Similarly, the portfolio performance rating has remained satisfactory at around 3 on a scale of 1 to 4 over the same period. Fiduciary compliance is also improving with progress observed in the submission rate of audited financial statements by the Executing/Implementing Agencies,” he said.
Barrow added that the rate of flagged operations had decreased from 32 per cent in October 2021 to 25 per cent in December 2021.
He said, “Thanks to improved coordination with the Ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning, as well as the concerted actions taken during the last quarter of 2021, the operations flagged for implementation challenges decreased from a high of 32 per cent in October 2021 to reach 25 per cent in December 2021. However, we must not relent in our efforts to further reduce the flagged operations and slay the dragon of slow implementation.”
He added, “Delayed implementation of projects imposes a high burden to the economy, and ultimately undermine our objectives to deliver development outcomes. We must therefore strengthen our accountability mechanisms backed by robust tracking tools to monitor implementation progress.”
Barrow further disclosed that AfDB has 63 operations worth $5bn in its portfolio in Nigeria.
Source Punch
