Improving the Asian Development Bank's education sector service delivery

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) currently has 41 non-graduated developing member countries (DMCs), with a population of approximately 3.7 billion and an estimated school-age population of about one billion. The ADB works across its DMCs to promote quality, accessible education to support sustainable development. To this end, it supports a range of interventions to promote inclusivity and enhance the quality of learning by improving delivery platforms across K-12, Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET), and Higher Education. To make ADB education interventions more effective, this chapter suggests that, given the constraints of staff expertise and experience, ADB should focus on niche areas of skill delivery across rural and urban schools and labor markets. It further argues that ADB can make in-house operational improvements by (i) redeploying staff expertise across the sub-regions and mitigating sub-regional “silo effects”; (ii) incorporating lessons learned in DMCs through widely shared country handbooks highlighting ADB “corporate memory”; and (iii) establishing Asia-wide education networks to advance sector development expertise within ADB and in DMCs.