Australia, Central Asia, Infrastructure, Multilaterals and Supranationals - Thursday, July 15, 2010 19:12 - 0 Comments

Intheblack: Getting Central Asia moving

 

Intheblack magazine, July 2010

In late May, Juan Miranda was in the Afghan town of Mazar-e-Sharif, attending the inauguration of Afghanistan’s first railway. As Director General of the Central and West Asia Department of the Asian Development Bank, Miranda had been involved in the funding and development of this railway, a vital 75-kilometre link to the border with Uzbekistan and the international railway networks beyond. But as he stepped back to take a photo of the train moving slowly backwards and forwards on the tracks, he noticed a huge transmission line in the back of a shot, and a road behind it. He realised he had been involved in the development of all three.

When you are a multilateral banker in this part of the world, the work can be tough, but when it works out there’s the joy of seeing a tangible difference being made. And Miranda’s patch of Asia is all about high challenge and high reward. His department operates in 10 countries most of which few people could successfully locate on a map (and, if they could, it would be for all the wrong reasons): Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. It is a patchwork of mostly landlocked countries with sometimes random borders, stubborn bureaucracy, limited commercial laws, dominated by mountains and deserts, into which Miranda must coax international private capital to invest.

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