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.
