In Papua New Guinea, squatters in several urban areas will be provided with low-cost, ventilated pit latrines to reduce the high rates of diarrhea and other waterborne intestinal diseases. The Japan Fund offers the opportunity to pilot test innovative schemes that may lead to much larger loan projects in the future. As such, it is an important instrument in ADB's stepped-up drive to halve the proportion of very poor people in Asia and the Pacific by 2015. Such interventions are only part of ADB's poverty-reduction strategy, adopted in 1999. The strategy rests on the three pro-poor pillars of sustainable economic growth, social development and good governance.
Economic growth is a powerful tool for reducing poverty by generating employment and income.
Examples of ADB supported pro-poor growth programs include rural electrification programs in Bangladesh and Bhutan. In areas where four out of five people lack power, electricity transforms lives. Irrigation pumps raise crops and incomes, men and women operate electric equipment for fishpond and livestock-rearing schemes and children switch on lights when they do their homework in the evenings. A second key pillar of ADB's poverty reduction strategy is social development. One such example is ADB's effort to bring education to girls in Pakistan, a country where more than 90 percent of females are illiterate.