The Asian Development Bank's utility twinning programme, with Satoshi Ishii, Director for Strategy and Partnerships, ADB and Vivek Raman, Principal, ADB

2025-05-20 episode 30 Vivek Raman and Satoshi Ishii
[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange 15-minute podcast in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, educate, and inform other water sector leaders from around the globe. My name is Piers Clark, and today I have two guests, not one as usual. We have Satoshi Ishii, the director for strategy and Partnerships for Water and Urban Development at the Asian Development Bank, and his colleague Vivek Raman, the principal for Urban Development. And we're gonna be talking about the twinning program that the Asian Development Bank has done. But before we get to that, let's start by learning a little bit about our interviewees. Satoshi, can I start with you? Where did you start? What did you study? How did you get to being in the role you are in today?
[00:00:42] Satoshi Ishii: Hi Piers. Thank you very much for inviting us to this podcast, it's really exciting. My education was, I started in a mechanical engineering degree in Japan, and then I went to the UK for a masters and PhDs in environmental study where I then shifted to environmental engineering and then urban engineering. I had a bit of working experience in Japan Bank International corporation that led me to the Asian Department Bank. So, I joined the bank 17 years ago. First seven and a half years I was in East Asia operation, basically working with people's Republic of China. Then I moved myself to Vietnam Hanoi. And now I'm back in HQ in charge of the water urban sector director strategy and partnerships.
[00:01:23] Piers Clark: And we're gonna come back to what is the Asian Development Bank, and what is it you do in a minute, but let me go to Vivek, fill in the gaps about your background as well, please.
[00:01:32] Vivek Raman: I studied economics and my undergrad was in London, and then I moved to the US to do my master's. And then I'm a product of MDBs (Multilateral Development Banks). I worked at the World Bank for a long time. Water and sanitation was my core sector. Then I moved to the UN briefly, and I joined ADB around seven years ago. I worked a little bit on knowledge and innovation at the very beginning, and now back to my core sector here working with Satoshi in strategy and partnerships.
[00:01:57] Piers Clark: So, what we've got are two internationally educated people who've been with the Asian Development Bank for quite a long time so you know how the system works, you know how to make an impact. Satoshi, tell me about the Asian Development Bank. What is it? Give us a sense of the scale and the purpose. Why does the Asian Development Bank exist?
[00:02:16] Satoshi Ishii: Asian Development Bank is one of the regional multilateral development bank. We do both public and private financing. But we are regional development bank, so we primarily working on the government on the public sector. So we do financing, the infrastructures, and also promoting policy reforms and those development agendas are always very important. We have been working on this job creation, climate change, and digitalization. Those are really important agenda for us. A DB covers 69 member countries, and then of those, 50 developing member country who is borrow from us. Our geographical coverage is Cook Island to the east and then Georgia to the west.
[00:02:57] Piers Clark: The clue is in the name, isn't it? The Asian Development Bank, you cover that part of the world. And so, you are lending money to mainly governments and the size of the checks that you are writing?
[00:03:06] Satoshi Ishii: At the moment our annual commitment is around 26 to 30 billion US dollar. But then since last year we also had our lending capacity increase to around 35 to 40 billion US dollar. That's the kind of capacity that we can commit every year. And let's say that around those maybe 10% is allocated for the water sector.
[00:03:27] Piers Clark: So, we got somewhere between two and $4 billion a year being invested into water in countries in the Asian region. Now, the reason we are having this podcast today is because May 2025 is an important month for the Asian Development Bank, and you've got the water forum coming up at the end of the month. What is the water forum? 'Cause you've been living and breathing this, haven't you, for the last six months or so?
[00:03:49] Vivek Raman: Absolutely. I just wanted to add a little bit to what Satoshi said. Why we are seen as a bank that's lending money to governments to solve or meet critical development needs. Knowledge plays a huge part of that. If you're the finance bank, it's the " plus" that we do, which is very important. And the knowledge forum fits in quite well. We are doing so much work with our clients and our developing member countries from Georgia to the Cook Islands. There's a lot of knowledge that's generated, so why should a government come to us as opposed to a regular bank? Because of that knowledge. We are a trusted partner that can deliver. The Water and Urban Development Forum that we are hosting is very important for that. So, for three reasons, we are doing this. One is: let's share knowledge; let's capture those lessons. Number two: let's expand networking amongst our partners, government officials. We are gonna be getting around 700 participants. Out of that 120 or so are gonna be government officials. These are the main people that we want to come and learn what's worked in Bangladesh, what's not worked in Cook Islands, or what is going to work in some other country and learn about that. And number three, we also have important financial partners who support us in this work and we want them to be able to see the impact all these projects across Asia is having. And lastly, we want staff to continuously be introduced to new ideas, new approaches. And that's the reasons why we are calling this year's forum "Valuing Water and Enhancing Livability in Asia and the Pacific."
[00:05:17] Piers Clark: That does capture beautifully what the Asian Development Bank does. You've got scale, 3 billion a year in water, and you've got this impact across multiple countries where the thing that you do is about sharing that knowledge and leveraging up so that every country gets better, which leads us to the twinning program that the Asian development bank's been doing. This isn't a new initiative, it's something that you've been doing for quite a long time. Satoshi, tell me more about the twinning program. When did it start and why did you do it?
[00:05:45] Satoshi Ishii: This is one of the very long partnership program that we have created since 2007. We have been running this almost 17, 18 years already. We already fosters more than 80 twining programs or partnerships between utilities. And we understand it's a very successful program. Of course we are in a development bank, we pay a lot of attention to the capacity building, and bring a lot of expert as a consultant. One of the intention that was that ADB can always hire a consultant expert to provide advice through capacity building to the utilities. But we also found that sometimes utility people and managers listen better with other utilities and managers like peers. We just decided to be facilitator of those twinning partnership. That could be bringing a lot more effective learning experience for some utilities as well. And that's how we started. And now we are even expanding the scope of this utility organization partnership looking into more climate resilient angle. The successive program has been evolving in the past years.
[00:06:48] Piers Clark: I love the idea that the pupils don't listen to the teacher. They'd much rather learn from the other pupils. If you're a practitioner, you want to talk to other practitioners, and yes, the funders will have their views, but I really want to learn from my peer group. Okay. I get the model. I get the idea it's been running for 18 years. Now, of course, what I want to get to is some case studies, some examples, some success stories of how it's worked.
[00:07:12] Vivek Raman: A lot of times people might say, " why are you doing this thing between utilities?" At the end of the day, development colleagues are working in these challenging environments in the government, et cetera; you suddenly are put on a pedestal. You're supposed to just know all the answers. And at the end of the day, people learn from other people. You don't necessarily learn from textbooks. You don't necessarily learn by reading a manual on how to operate, say a wastewater treatment plant. This is where I think ADB has been playing a great role for the past 17, 18 years. We have done 83 twinnings across the 17, 18 years. There's been plenty of lessons learned by the organization, by the partners at the end. And one of the biggest thing that we learned is that there's tangible learning of "this is the memorandum of understanding. You are gonna help us on say, non-revenue water, billing and collection, efficiency, wastewater treatment options, et cetera." But the intangible really matters. The relationship that you form between two utilities folks sitting in different parts of Asia, that number that you have to be able to say, "I'm stuck here, can you help me?" I've seen this happen. That can never be quantified. And we all do this in day-to-day life. So why shouldn't we be doing this in our day-to-day work as well? For these folks, that's really been the greatest; for us, the reason why we are very proud of this program. There have been plenty of success, and I'll try and tell you some stories of what have been the tangible successes as well. Let's talk about the story between the Water Authority of Fiji and Sydney Water. This happened a couple of years ago, but non-revenue water was the big topic, and we wanted to twin these utilities to learn about that. So, every twinning runs around 12 months to 18 months, because you can't do it in just one visit. That's been a huge lesson that we learned. $1.3 million saved in less than two years by helping them curb that non-revenue water. We quantified this- additional income was generated from anywhere between $2,000 to $6,000 and we helped them increase their capital funding to around $82 million as a result of the business planning exercise that the two utilities learned from each other.
[00:09:18] Piers Clark: And what's the flow of information from Sydney Water to Fiji, or was there also a flow of learning from Fiji to Sydney Water?
[00:09:26] Vivek Raman: It's so interesting. You think it's gonna be one way learning and it never is. Almost every mentor at the end when we do a closing ceremony says, we learned so much from our mentee as well. And that's something that we don't really capture because when you share the result, it's always the $2,000 saved or $82,000 generated in income. But every mentor report says repeatedly that learning was both ways.
[00:09:52] Piers Clark: So now let's talk about the future of this program. It's been running for 18 years. Satoshi, is it tired and coming to the end of its run or has it still got life to go and if so, what does that future look like?
[00:10:04] Satoshi Ishii: We are interested to continue not because, demand is increasing, but we are looking at Asia and Pacific Market and where all the water utilities are now looking more business-minded. And that's very important for us because for ADB to remain relevant in Asian Pacific, we are shifting rapidly to the private sector financing. So, of course, some of the utility might be receiving the public sector financing through the government. Now some of them are corporatized and some of them are more business-minded, more innovative CEOs. So, we like to make sure that those water utilities are really moving. And that kind of shift we like to support in the coming years. We started off with technical assistance, technical peer to peer learning, and that continue to be relevant. But then we like to maybe add more into governance, financial management, business strategy, and so on. I think ADB would like to continue fostering, those peer-to-peer learning in the different areas. We want to continue expanding this and then hopefully this is gonna keep us relevant in a sector and in the region.
[00:11:07] Piers Clark: I'm absolutely certain it will. We started this podcast talking about the Asian Development Bank's water forum coming up at the end of the month. And there's going to be multiple mentors and mentees there. I believe the plan is that, over the coming months, we'll be talking to some of those mentors and mentees on this podcast and sharing some of those learnings. Is that correct?
[00:11:26] Vivek Raman: Absolutely! Our twinning program is called the Water Operators Partnership for Resilience. The internal acronym we use is WOP4R. So, we've got WOP4R 2.0 coming. We have twinnings ongoing between nine utilities in various stages and we have a five-step program of how we do this. There's a diagnostic, there is multiple visits happening between the mentor and the mentee, there's an MOU so that there's some agreement on priorities that these two partner entities have to focus on, and finally, there's the learning aspect. In the learning aspect, we realize there's scope for improvement. I feel like there should be more effort put in to capture this kind of work that we are doing. Number two is we are also trying to reach scale; connecting it much closer to ADB projects that are ongoing, where this kind of component cannot be embedded in a typical project document. This is the additional support a government gets when they work with ADB so that knowledge sharing is a big part. This podcast is a big part of that. We wanna reach audiences across the globe and then there's gonna be a whole bunch of other efforts, more traditional and non-traditional, to capture that knowledge that's been learned.
[00:12:41] Piers Clark: I am delighted that the executive exchange can help facilitate that 'cause this is so important for the global water sector to learn from our peers. Now, we've run out of time, but if I could just ask you in 20 seconds each, what advice would you give your younger self? If you could go back 20, 25 years, would you be working at the Asian Development Bank? Would you be working in water? Let's start with you Satoshi. What advice would you give a younger Satoshi if you could speak to him now?
[00:13:09] Satoshi Ishii: At that time, I finished my PhD at Imperial College and then I was looking for a job and I was thinking about Asian Department Bank. I would like to advise that younger  Satoshi should have continued striving. My career has been always in engineering area, but I would recommend him to study more about management or some sort of business minded, private sector skillset.
[00:13:30] Piers Clark: Of course, the reason we ask this question is 'cause there will be people at the early stage of their career listening to this thinking, how do I become the Satoshi of the future? Work harder is basically the message there. Vivek, what would the advice be that you'd give your younger self?
[00:13:42] Vivek Raman: I just wanna say I'm still relatively young. It gives the impression that I'm like this really old person. I'm very happy where I am in my career. I don't know how to work in a private sector. But, if I was going 20 years back, I would've said, " things are complex on the ground. There's no easy fix solution and therefore you have to chip away at it. And 20 years ago, I thought, "you'll come in, you'll just provide some water taps and build some toilets and the world will be a better place." There's so much more behind that. If I recognize that, I would've paced myself differently.
[00:14:14] Piers Clark: You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with me, Piers Clark, and my guests today have been Satoshi Ishi and Vivek Raman, from the Asian Development Bank. I hope you can join us next time.