Organizational
Effectiveness
Building a Faster, Stronger, and More Responsive ADB
A renewed organizational vision adopted by ADB in 2024 called for solving challenges together, connecting the region, and empowering people for dynamic economies and a healthy planet.
In 2025, ADB translated this vision into action by strengthening the way it works. As development challenges become more interconnected and operations grow in scale and complexity, achieving greater impact depends not only on what ADB delivers, but also on how it delivers. Throughout the year, ADB advanced institutional reforms to become faster, stronger, and more responsive—enhancing its capacity to support developing member countries and deliver better development results.
From silos to working as One ADB
Strengthening collaboration to deliver more integrated solutions.
Joint leadership and project design are helping bring together expertise from across the institution, ensuring operations are designed around development outcomes. ADB’s collaboration reforms are expected to lay the groundwork to increasing the 14% share of jointly processed committed projects in 2025. Recognizing that institutional change takes time, ADB is strengthening incentives and accountability to embed collaboration more systematically across departments and operations.
A collaboration credit mechanism introduced in 2025 recognizes meaningful cross-department contributions, while a new corporate indicator to be tracked from 2026 will increase visibility of joint engagement in nonsovereign operations. ADB is also promoting collaboration through multisector initiatives in areas such as natural capital, critical minerals, energy efficiency, green skills, and food systems, supported by strategic initiatives including the food systems transformation agenda and the new Digital Sector Office.
Unlocking knowledge across ADB.
ADB’s ability to remain relevant depends not only on the scale of its operations but also on how effectively knowledge and data are shared and applied across the institution. In 2025, the Knowledge Management Capability Assessment Tool highlighted a decline in ADB’s knowledge management maturity, revealing gaps in governance, coordination, and institutional processes as ADB transitioned to its new operating model. In response, ADB accelerated efforts to strengthen the institutional foundations for knowledge-driven delivery. It established the ADB Center of Excellence to better connect in-house expertise with developing member countries and promote learning from operational experience. At the same time, ADB modernized its digital platforms and simplified internal systems to make institutional knowledge, data, and processes easier to access and use. The Sovereign Operations System (SovOps) advanced as an integrated platform for managing the full sovereign operations cycle, providing a single source for country programming, integrated dashboards, and near real-time portfolio visibility. Complementing this, ADB’s Integrated Data Ecosystem gives staff and Management access to trusted data for a consistent view of performance and risks.
Aligning policies and business processes with results-oriented delivery.
ADB strengthened the alignment of policy, business processes, and delivery in 2025 through targeted reform that improved governance, coordination, and operational efficiency. Updates to sovereign business processes clarified team roles, strengthened quality assurance, and reduced reliance on shadow processes, enabling teams to focus more on results than process. Policy updates notably revision of the results-based lending policy and the approval of the sovereign financial intermediation lending policy—have enhanced ADB flexibility when responding to country needs, supported innovative financing, and strengthened crisis response capacity
Bringing decisions closer to clients
ADB is strengthening its presence closer to clients by scaling up expertise in the field.
In 2025, ADB boosted international and local technical staff numbers in field offices from 768 to 830. This growth outpaced overall staff increase, reflecting an emphasis on field capability as a core enabler of responsiveness and policy dialogue. Adapting operational support to overcome local capacity constraints, targeted support was provided to fragile and conflict-affected situations (FCAS) and small island developing states (SIDS), where capacity and logistical constraints pose greater challenges. In 2025, technical staff in these economies increased from 115 to 124 alongside with efforts to strengthen local participation in procurement planning, expand the outposting of operation support functions such as procurement and financial management, and identify solutions to reduce supply-chain risks in the Pacific. ADB is also leveraging strategic partnerships to scale up impact, including through the appointment of a Chief Partnership Officer to strengthen resource mobilization and partnership coordination, and the operationalization of the Full Mutual Reliance Framework with the World Bank for selected cofinanced projects, enabling either ADB or World Bank to lead using one set of policies to accelerate implementation.
Strengthening ADB’s staff and systems
Advancing workforce diversity, leadership, and talent development.
In 2025, women accounted for 41.4% of ADB’s international staff, up from 40.3% in 2024, while representation of women in senior management reached 33.6%. Although progress continued, there is a need to further strengthen the leadership pipeline and expand opportunities for career development. To support this, ADB will implement the Strategic Human Resource Framework, endorsed in January 2026, which provides an integrated approach to recruitment, learning, mobility, performance management, and career development. The framework will help build a more diverse, capable, and future-ready workforce across headquarters and field offices.
Increasing digital fluency for the future.
ADB completed Digital Agenda 2030 – Stage 1 in 2025, delivering 47 projects to modernize institutional business processes. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) also expanded through ADB Genie and Microsoft Copilot, supported by a responsible AI framework. A bank-wide digital self-assessment involving 3,856 staff found that while AI adoption is improving, gaps remain in the advanced use of AI applications. To ensure digital transformation leads to stronger operational performance, ADB introduced a new corporate indicator in 2025 to measure digital capability across the workforce. The indicator reported 16% progress in its first year, capturing staff who attained IT certifications, senior leaders who completed the Driving Digital Leadership Program, and domain experts applying AI in their work. Supporting initiatives included a bank-wide digital competency self-assessment, structured learning pathways, and expanded professional training and certification. These efforts lay the foundation for achieving ADB’s 2030 target of 80% of staff reaching digital competency Level 3 and strengthening their digital capabilities needed to deliver results.
Maintaining financial discipline while investing in future delivery.
In 2025, ADB continued to manage its finances prudently while making targeted investments to strengthen its capacity for future growth. Administrative expenses increased to support additional staff and digital systems, but the cost-to-income ratio remained at 60%, well below the 70% target. At the same time, higher capital utilization and a lower nonperforming loan ratio reflected continued financial strength, sound risk management, and ample capacity to expand operations. These investments are laying the institutional foundations needed to support future operational expansion while maintaining ADB’s long-term financial sustainability.
Embedding environmental responsibility in how ADB works.
In 2025, ADB strengthened efforts to reduce its environmental footprint as an organization. This marked the first full year that headquarters sourced all its electricity from solar and wind power, while renewable energy installations were expanded across field offices. ADB also introduced electric vehicles, improved organic waste management, and launched a new platform for collecting and reporting environmental data across all offices. Together, these investments are helping ADB reduce emissions, improve resource efficiency, and embed environmental sustainability into its day-to-day operations.
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