Part One of the interview with Emma Veve, the new Director General of the ADB Pacific Department conducted by PACNEWS Editor, Makereta Komai on the sidelines of the 58th ADB Governor’s Annual Meeting in Milan, Italy. Veve took office in February this year and is tasked with the delivery of ADB’s vision and strategy in the Pacific
PACNEWS: Thank you again for this opportunity to be able to talk to you, DG Veve. I know that you have just started on job as head of the Pacific Department based in Manila for a few months now. Can we begin with the overarching Pacific Approach, ADB’s strategy to engage and deliver your work for members in the Pacific. I understand that the current Pacific Approach from 2021 to 2025 is coming to an end this year. And whatever new form it will take will be up for discussion between the ADB and your Pacific member countries. How will that look like and how long will the process take?
Emma Veve: It’s great to be back in the Pacific where I’ve spent a lot of my working career and I’ve had some wonderful years living in Fiji. So, I’m thrilled to be back in a region where I know a lot of people and have a bit of history. So that’s great to be back. It’s a bit daunting to be in charge of the Pacific Department of the ADB based in Manila overseeing our country office in PNG and our regional offices in Sydney and Suva. Soon our new office in the Solomon Islands and hopefully in the near future perhaps an office in the North Pacific as well. So, as a development bank we need a strategy to tell us what we’re doing and how we can work towards our development goals.
And for the last number of years, we’ve really been focused on trying to build the resilience of the Pacific and make it a more resilient and more inclusive place for people to live in. That’s really driven our last Pacific Approach which covers the 12 smaller countries. We have a standalone country strategy for Fiji and Papua New Guinea, but there are a lot of similarities between those three.
But it was really a product of its time and it was developed sort of at the outset of COVID. So, we were all used to dealing with the economic shocks from global situations. We were relatively used to dealing with natural hazards and the impacts of those. And then we’re dealing with the pandemic as well. So really resilience is at the forefront of our mind. How can we help these small countries in the region bounce back from all these externally inflicted difficulties? And so over the last few years there’s been a big, big focus on building resilience to climate change. Focussing on climate adaptation activities that also bring jobs at the same time to local communities and provide a lot of other benefits. But, basically helping to ready populations for a future where the climate is not as bad as it has been.
PACNEWS: In terms of resilience – through the projects you’ve delivered to the Pacific, has it resulted in a more resilient Pacific – to the impacts of climate change, natural disasters and other general economic risks and shocks?
Emma Veve: We certainly have not built enough. And I don’t think one organisation alone can build enough. There’s a big need to really build the needed resilience for climate change. But what we have done is we’ve made a good start on many things. I think we’ve done work on desalination plants in the Pacific. That was something that 10, 15 years ago we had no experience in and weren’t particularly needed in most countries. We’ve done that in the Marshall Islands, in Kiribati, and helped them to ensure they have reliable supply of water and not be dependent on importing it from overseas or rainfall that’s far more unreliable than it used to be. We’ve also, I think the Pacific has been very keen to show the rest of the world what it can do in terms of mitigation. If they can make an effort to mitigate against climate change, so should everyone else. We’ve also had a really strong focus on renewable energy. And for the Pacific, that’s been a win-win.
Some countries have been burdened down by the foreign exchange costs of having to import largely diesel fuel to run generators that when something goes wrong you have to bring in parts and people from overseas to fix them. So, shifting to solar, hydro, wind power really uses the resources that you’ve got for free in your country and provides a much cheaper cost of energy and leaves a system that those communities are able to manage much better themselves than complex diesel-based ones. Looking at renewables with battery storage to get you through the peak periods has been a big focus.
But that’s not to say we haven’t done a lot of other things. With the climate lens, so we’ve looked at working on health centres, for example, right across parts of New Guinea. Out in rural areas where we’re building health centres that are really resilient. They’re hard to impact with cyclones, earthquakes, etc. So very strong, well-built, and very easy to maintain.
So, I don’t think that’s going to change going forward. And I guess maybe the what more can be done will probably focus into what can be done. And one of the things that we’ve really been working hard on is working not just with governments but with the private sector in countries.
And I think everyone has realised this for a really long time. You don’t want to just focus on using half your resources or your public service. You want to use your private sector as well. You want that private sector to grow so that people coming out of school go, you know, maybe I could work for government but look for all these exciting private sector opportunities. Maybe I’ll head in that direction. Which is not a choice every child coming out of school across the Pacific has.
PACNEWS: You mentioned earlier increasing presence in the Pacific, opening up an office in Solomon Islands. Why Solomon Islands?
Emma Veve: Solomons is now the second largest portfolio. So, the value of the ongoing projects in Solomons is second only to Papua New Guinea until Fiji. At the moment, we don’t have a resident mission. We’ve got what we call a Pacific Coordination Office with two locals who have amazing in getting good engagement with government and helping us better understand how things work locally. It will be a resident mission with a country director. We are looking for who that person should be right now. And later this year, we hope to be able to open that and get it up and running.
PACNEWS: You also mentioned considering a similar office up north?
Emma Veve: We’ve just hired what we personally call the North Pacific Advisor. So same level job as a country director, but he’ll sit in Manila and look after the three North Pacific country relationships for us. At the moment, that was being done by a more junior person, sort of as their full-time job. So, this brings a higher level of engagement. And part of their initial job will also be to assess, do we need an office in the North Pacific or does it make sense? If so, where, when? And to start that thinking and internal discussion about an office.
PACNEWS: So, the consultation on the new Pacific Approach will begin in the second half of this year? And how long will the process take?
Emma Veve: At the moment, we’re wrapping up our evaluation of how the last Pacific approach went. We spoke a bit about some of the things. Then we have some internal strategising to get our vice-president comfortable with the direction we’re heading in it. And then we will hit the road in the Pacific to talk to all of the countries. And then as many development partners as we can get a hold of to make sure the strategic focus is clear and our complementarity to other donors is clear. And we hope to get it up to our board by the middle of next year.
PACNEWS: Given the discussions here in Milan from the governor’s business session, of course you would have heard the Pacific countries through the Solomon Islands governor. While listening to the Pacific statement, it seems like a shopping list of everything that the Pacific would like for ADB to address. Some of those things that you heard align with what your priorities are already in the Pacific? And do you see any new emerging, new strategic areas that ADB consider in the next Pacific Approach?
Emma Veve: No, I think there is really good alignment between what the partners said. I think we’ve sort of the core things of focus in terms of building resilience, developing the private sector at core. But there’s a lot of other things as well and some of them mentioned in the business session. Particularly things around correspondent banking and finance sector and making that work well. I think we’re hearing a lot about the importance of making use of digital technologies in the Pacific. And I think that’s something the Pacific has been a little bit slower perhaps and needs a bit more attention.
Capacity is a constant issue in the Pacific. The bank has been around 50 plus years in the Pacific and we’ve been trying to build capacity from the beginning. But thinking of different ways to do it that suit specific needs of particular countries. In some countries we’re centralising our project support. In others we’re bringing in external specialists to help.
We’re now looking at working with regional organisations and national organisations like public service commissions. For example, to try training in things like financial management, project management. It will be useful across not just our projects but across all of the government projects. This is relatively new and something sort of in the train that we’re starting to talk about and hope to develop under the next Pacific Approach. It will be capacity development that it is more sustainable, more owned by countries and more in use rather than just coming in and training a lot of these new things.
