RP's ODA absorption nearly doubles in first half

MANILA, Philippines - The government’s disbursement of official development assistance (ODA) loans improved in the first semester of the year, according to the ODA loan performance report released by the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) yesterday.

ODA disbursement grew by 96 percent to $826.59 million from January to June compared to the same period last year largely because of two loans from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the World Bank (WB), the report said.

This brought the total cumulative ODA loans to $8.07 billion during the first half of the year.

“The significant increase in disbursements was largely attributed to the single tranche release of two program loans of $150 million (Governance in Justice Sector Reform Program, Subprogram II) and $200 million (The Global Food Crisis Response Program Development Policy Operations) funded by ADB and WB, respectively,” the report said.

The disbursement level is the actual amount of disbursements from all ODA loans.

According to the report, there was a general increase in all major financial indicators of ODA absorptive capacity.

For instance, the report noted that the disbursement rate, which is the percentage of actual disbursements over target disbursement, increased to 86 percent in the first six months of 2009 from 80 percent during the same period last year.

On the other hand, the percentage of cumulative actual disbursements over scheduled disbursements, or the availment rate rose to 81 percent in the first half of the year from 74 percent in the same period in 2008.

The disbursement ratio — the share of actual disbursements to the net loan amount available during the year — also rose to 17 percent in the first semester of 2009 from 13 percent in the same period last year.

However, the report said that there were 31 program and project loans that had disbursement rates below 50 percent due to procurement-related and financial processing issues and other issues such as right-of-way problems.

The country’s biggest ODA source is the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), with a 38 percent share of total ODA commitments. JICA is followed by the World Bank (18 percent), the ADB (15 percent) and China (12 percent). All other donors comprise 17 percent of total ODA loans.