SUVA, Fiji — The Asian Development Bank and World Bank have launched the first Pacific projects under their Full Mutual Reliance Framework: a $236.5 million overhaul of Fiji’s health system and a $120 million upgrade of Tonga’s transport and urban infrastructure. Under this initiative, a single “lead lender” manages cofinanced projects, allowing governments to focus on delivering clinics, bridges, and drainage systems rather than navigating two sets of rules, Dec. 4, 2025.
How the ADB World Bank FMRF changes Pacific finance
The Full Mutual Reliance Framework, agreed in February, allows borrowers to apply a single set of procurement, safeguards, and reporting rules to a cofinanced project, using the systems of whichever institution is chosen as the lead lender. The arrangement, launched as a four-year pilot, is described by both banks as a first-of-its-kind model among multilateral lenders to cut duplication, speed approvals, and scale up joint operations in Asia and the Pacific.
Under the framework, the Fiji project — known as the Pacific Healthy Islands Transformation, or PHIT — will be led by the World Bank and become the largest single bank operation in the Pacific. It will modernise primary health-care networks, finance a new regional hospital, and target noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer that have driven some of the region’s highest amputation and mortality rates, according to a joint ADB–World Bank Pacific projects news release. ADB’s cofinancing package is expected to go to its Board in early 2026, alongside support from partners such as the OPEC Fund and Australia.
The second investment, the Tonga Sustainable Economic Corridors and Urban Resilience (SECURE) project, is led by ADB and backed by a combined $120 million in grant financing — the largest development-partner-supported project in Tonga’s history. Focused on Greater Nukuʻalofa, it will overhaul key roads, urban drainage, and water systems and build a 720-meter bridge over the Fangaʻuta lagoon to ease congestion, connect markets, and provide safer evacuation routes during cyclones and tsunamis.
For Fiji and Tonga, both classified as small island developing states, the ADB World Bank cofinancing means larger packages with fewer transaction costs. Officials from both institutions say the framework emerged directly from Pacific governments’ frustration at having to negotiate parallel missions, safeguard reviews, and reporting schedules for each lender, even when they were financing the same bridge or hospital.
The approach is also designed to be scalable. World Bank President Ajay Banga said about 20 additional ADB World Bank projects are already in the pipeline across infrastructure, energy, agribusiness, health, and social protection, while discussions are underway to apply similar mutual-reliance models with other development banks in Europe, the Americas, and Africa.
ADB World Bank partnership builds on years of Pacific cofinancing
This is not the first time the ADB World Bank partnership has underpinned Pacific development. An ADB feature on its collaboration, the ADB–World Bank partnership, helping the Pacific reach development goals, noted that in 2020 the World Bank Group cofinanced 9 projects with ADB totalling about $1.3 billion, including budget support that helped Tonga manage the economic shock of COVID-19 while protecting social spending.
Those earlier efforts relied on negotiated, project-by-project arrangements. The new FMRF — further detailed in a World Bank brief on the proposed ADB–World Bank framework — turns that ad hoc practice into a structured platform intended to accelerate cofinancing volumes and make it easier for Pacific governments to tap both institutions’ capital and technical expertise.
Efficiency push raises accountability questions.
Civil society groups that have followed the ADB, World Bank, and FMRF warn that speed must not come at the expense of safeguards. An NGO Forum on ADB statement of concern last year argued that relying on a single lead lender’s standards and accountability mechanism could make it harder for affected communities to seek redress if projects cause harm.
Since then, World Bank and ADB officials have stressed that both institutions’ safeguard systems remain in force and that complaints on FMRF projects will be handled through the lead lender’s independent accountability mechanism, backed by a new framework agreement between the World Bank Inspection Panel and ADB’s Compliance Review Panel. At the same time, accountability advocates continue to press for clearer guarantees that mutual reliance will not dilute environmental and social protections as the ADB World Bank pipeline expands.
For Pacific governments, the test will be whether this first wave of cofinanced projects delivers visible gains: shorter waiting times in Fiji’s clinics, safer commutes and flood-free streets in Nukuʻalofa, and faster rollout of future investments now sitting in the 20-project ADB World Bank pipeline.
