ADB offers loans, grants, and technical assistance from Special Funds, Trust Funds, and other sources to help reduce poverty in Asia’s poorest countries.
Most of ADB's lending comes from its ordinary capital resources (OCR), offered at near-market terms to lower- to middle-income countries—and beginning in 2017—at very low interest rates to lower income countries. The Asian Development Fund (ADF) offers grants that help reduce poverty in ADB's poorest borrowing countries.
ADB also partners with the private sector by investing in smaller, riskier projects that are innovative, complex, and in challenging markets and sectors through financing programs such as the Trade and Supply Chain Finance Program.
ADB’s Ordinary Capital Resources operations are diverse, covering focus areas and sectors supporting operational priorities.
ADF provides grants to ADB's lower-income developing member countries. Activities supported by the ADF promote poverty reduction and improvements in the quality of life in the poorer countries of the Asia and Pacific region.
ADB also establishes and utilizes other funds and financing facilities to administer for its projects. These may involve partnerships with private entities and/or member countries and are given the same amount of care as ADB's own resources.
ADB continues to add value to its provision of financing by developing new and innovative funding mechanisms. An innovation to combine ADF’s equity and lending operations with OCR balance sheet to enhance ADB’s lending capacity, while retaining ADF as a grant-only donor fund to provide grant assistance to eligible countries, took effect on 1 January 2017. This has increased ADB’s financial capacity to well over $20 billion by 2020.
Concessional lending to poor countries continue from the expanded OCR, on the same terms and conditions as current ADF loans.
