2001 was perhaps a terrible year for Nepal's economy, but it was not as bad for the Asian Development Bank in Nepal, as we were told at a year-end press conference last week. The bank approved loans worth $95.6 million to Nepal in 2001, in line with its spending plan in a low-growth scenario. The loans are to be used for teacher training ($19.6 million), governance reform ($30 million), and road maintenance, highways, feeder and district roads ($46 million). The roads project shall by co-financed by the Department for International Development (DfID), which is giving over $10 million, and the government, which is putting in $13.9 million. The governance reform loan will be used to help government make the civil service more result-oriented, and also bring about greater gender balance in the bureaucracy by supporting affirmative action amendments in the Civil Service Act. The bank also provided $4 million as technical assistance. All this takes the bank's cumulative assistance to Nepal since it started doing business here in 1968 to about $1.9 billion. Disbursements, however, have not been fast enough, of which the Rural Electrification, Distribution and Transmission Project (RETDP), approved in late 1999, is a classic example, though that might be moving on. "We've reached agreement on four activity conditions and only a subsidiary loan agreement between the government and the Nepal Electricity Authority remains to be finalised," said Richard Vokes, resident AsDB representative. Two other programs-the Upper Sagarmatha Agriculture Development and the Rural Infrastructure Development projects-remain suspended for poor quality of work, supervision and management.