Behind the headline-grabbing railway deals sits a quieter document that will decide how the Asian Development Bank spends money in Pakistan for the next four years. The bank’s new Country Partnership Strategy, or CPS, for Pakistan runs from 2026 to 2030, and it was formally launched earlier this year through the ADB Pakistan Resident Mission in Islamabad. It is the framework that everything from ML-1 railway financing to smaller provincial water projects will now be measured against.
Background
A Country Partnership Strategy is essentially the ADB’s medium-term game plan for a member country. It sets out which sectors the bank will prioritise, how much lending capacity it expects to commit, and what reforms it wants to see from the government in exchange for that support. Pakistan’s previous CPS covered 2021 to 2025 and focused heavily on economic management and resilience building during a period marked by the pandemic and severe flooding.
The new strategy, covering 2026 through 2030, was launched under ADB Country Director for Pakistan Emma Fan, who took over the Pakistan Resident Mission role in October 2024. She has since led consultations on the fresh CPS, which the bank says is meant to address structural weaknesses in the economy rather than just respond to short-term shocks.
Details
The 2026-2030 CPS is built around three broad priorities: lifting long-term growth, increasing economic resilience, and boosting competitiveness, particularly in the private sector. Layered on top of those are what the bank calls crosscutting themes, covering governance reforms, gender equality, digital transformation, and regional connectivity.
In practice, this means the ADB Pakistan Resident Mission will keep channelling money into a mix of sovereign loans for infrastructure like ML-1 and non-sovereign, private-sector operations aimed at attracting outside capital. The bank has also signalled interest in expanding guarantee instruments, the same kind of tool discussed during the recent ML-1 and PPP talks between the Economic Affairs Division and a visiting ADB delegation.
Who Runs the Pakistan Resident Mission
The Pakistan Resident Mission has operated out of Islamabad since 1989, making it one of the ADB’s longer-standing country offices in the region. It currently sits under Country Director Emma Fan, with Syed Hussain Haider serving as Deputy Country Director. The mission is the main point of contact between the bank and Pakistan’s Economic Affairs Division, which formally manages the government’s relationship with all multilateral lenders.
Beyond deal-making, the mission handles day-to-day portfolio management for dozens of ongoing projects and acts as a knowledge base for policy dialogue with federal and provincial governments. Recent hiring activity at the mission, including postings for senior country specialists and financial sector project officers, points to a resident team that is expanding rather than shrinking as the new CPS gets underway.
Tenders and Project Pipeline
For businesses and contractors watching Asian Development Bank tenders in Pakistan, the CPS matters because it effectively previews where procurement activity is headed. Sectors flagged as priorities under the strategy, including transport, finance, and climate resilience, tend to generate a steady flow of consulting and construction contracts as individual projects move from design into implementation. The bank publishes procurement notices for these projects on its own website as loans are approved and disbursed, and interested firms typically need to register through ADB’s standard vendor and consultant systems well before a specific tender is announced.
Quotes
Announcing the new strategy, Country Director Emma Fan said the plan was designed to tackle the country’s underlying structural problems rather than offer another round of short-term fixes. She added that the approach promotes investment and reform together, and that the bank looks forward to supporting both government and private sector partners in carrying it out.
Impact
A four-year strategy does not generate headlines the way a single railway loan does, but it shapes far more of the bank’s day-to-day activity in the country. Provincial governments, private developers bidding on infrastructure work, and consulting firms chasing ADB-funded contracts all plan around documents like this one, since it signals which sectors are likely to see fresh loan approvals over the coming budget cycles.
For ordinary borrowers, the more concrete effect will show up gradually, through project financing for things like power distribution upgrades, urban water systems, and vocational training programs tied to the private-sector competitiveness goal. None of that carries the same news value as a $10 billion railway line, but it tends to have a broader reach across provinces that rarely see large single infrastructure projects.
Conclusion
The ML-1 railway talks and the new CPS are really two sides of the same relationship. One is a specific, high-profile deal under negotiation; the other is the wider framework the ADB Pakistan Resident Mission will use to decide what else gets funded between now and 2030. Whether Pakistan can turn this strategy into a genuinely different growth trajectory will depend less on the paperwork and more on whether the government follows through on the governance and reform commitments the bank has tied to it.
FAQs
Who gave 1 billion loans to Pakistan?
More than one lender has extended financing around the $1 billion mark to Pakistan in recent years, so this depends on the specific facility being referenced. The IMF approved roughly $1 billion under its Extended Fund Facility as part of a combined $1.2 billion package cleared in May 2026, on top of separate climate-related financing under the Resilience and Sustainability Facility. The Asian Development Bank has also structured elements of its ML-1 railway support in billion-dollar tranches, and institutions such as the World Bank have provided comparable amounts for budget and infrastructure support over the past several years, so the identity of the lender depends entirely on which loan and which year is being asked about.
Does Pakistan plan to receive an IMF loan in 2026?
Pakistan has already been receiving IMF financing throughout 2026 under its existing Extended Fund Facility arrangement. The Fund’s Executive Board approved a combined tranche of roughly $1.3 billion in May 2026 after completing the third EFF review and a parallel review under the Resilience and Sustainability Facility. Further disbursements later in the year were expected to depend on a subsequent review focused on tax collection performance and energy sector reforms, with IMF staff visiting Islamabad to assess progress before recommending approval to the Executive Board. Since the underlying EFF program runs into 2027, additional tranches beyond 2026 remain part of the current plan as long as Pakistan continues meeting its agreed targets.
Who is funding the ADB?
The ADB is owned collectively by its member governments rather than by any single funder. More than 60 countries hold shares in the bank, with Japan and the United States as the largest shareholders, followed by China and India among others. Member countries pay in capital subscriptions that underpin the bank’s balance sheet, and the ADB also borrows heavily on international bond markets, using its high credit rating to raise funds at low cost before lending that money on to developing member countries, including Pakistan, for infrastructure and development projects like those covered under the new Country Partnership Strategy.
