The Asian Development Bank has signed an agreement with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development on alternative procurement arrangements, allowing cofinanced projects to follow a single procurement framework. 

Under ADB’s procurement framework, the alternative procurement arrangements allows one bank to be the lead cofinancier on a project, and the procurement of all, or a portion of, the contracts under the project to follow the lead cofinancier’s procurement policies and procedures.

ADB signed a similar agreement with the World Bank last year.

The arrangement allows cofinanced projects to be implemented more efficiently by applying a single framework to the whole project, thereby reducing the end-to-end procurement time and transaction costs for ADB’s clients. ADB is negotiating with other multilateral agencies the opportunity to use similar arrangements under cofinanced projects.