By : Karan Shrestha

After a long period of time, Nepal has finally announced to organize National Development Forum (NDF) meeting very soon. Speaking officially in Asian Development Fund (ADF) meeting organized by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Manila, Philippines, Finance Secretary of Nepal, Krishna Hari Baskota said that Nepal is going to prepare for both Economic Summit and Development forum meetings in the near future. According to him, the country has been fully utilizing foreign aid since the last six decade. The Government of Nepal is going to organize both meeting in coming days to create and sustain the favorable environment of development within a country by its own investment, to maximize success over foreign aid.

In the meeting, the donors from different countries appealed the developing countries to improve their performance, being transparency and ensure in the matter of corruption for effective utilization of foreign aid from coming days. In the meantime, some of the donor countries and others agreed to provide $12 Billion aid to the ADF in the next four years including 35 % from Japan, 9% from Australia, 6% from United States and 3% from South Korea and Germany respectively. However, European Union is unable to contribute for increment on such aid due to its financial crisis. 

 As Aid is meant not to build dependency to the country over a long period of time, but to make it reliant economically. Krishna Hari Baskota in meeting of ADF stressed, Nepal has categorized mainly four most priorities sector to focus currently; peace, constitution, good governance and economic prosperity. The Government has recently declared ‘Nepal Investment Year’ for 2012/13 for which The Investment Board is exercising through creating a friendly and healthy climate to attract many foreign investors from different nation.

Briefing to the donors, Mr. Baskota said the Governments policies and reforms have started screening outcomes, as the microeconomic indicators recently have been encouraging in past months. Despite lots of challenges in economic sectors, the nation had observed 3.5% growth in last fiscal year and has expectation of 5% growth on it. The Inflation has come down to 6.8 % in the first six months of the current fiscal year as compared to 9.6% in the same period last fiscal year previously. There is also rise in revenue mobilization to 20% from 11.5% and increased inflow of remittance to 39 per cent from 12% in the same period of last fiscal year.