MADRID (AFP) — China should channel more of its growing foreign aid through multinational organisations, the director general of the Asian Development Bank, Rajat Nag, said Wednesday in Spain.
"China is playing a very important role as an emerging donor, they are actually also a donor to the Asian Development Fund, and we strongly encourage that countries which themselves have benefited from the generosity of others during their development phase in turn try to return some of that," he said.
"It is equally important that we bring them into the donor community, as it were, because then you get some principles of various safeguards to be applied, be it on social safeguards, be it on the environment," he added.
China's policy of providing aid, especially to Africa where it is seeking raw materials for its booming economy, without tying it to certain reforms has received international criticism.
The country's aid often comes with far more attractive conditions than that offered by multinational bodies like the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank.
China is one of the 67 members that make up the Asian Development Bank (ADB) -- 48 from the Asia-Pacific region, and 19 from elsewhere around the world -- which will begin a four-day annual meeting in Madrid on Saturday.
The Asian Development Fund, funded by ADB's donor member countries, offers loans at very low interest rates and grants that help reduce poverty in its poorest borrowing countries.
Despite the global credit crunch and economic slowdown, Nag said he was optimistic that the ADB would be able to secure sufficient funding for its activities.
"I am confident that the immediate budgetary constraints of the various countries in the donor community will not come in the way of their continuing to be generous towards the poor of the Asia-Pacific region," he said.
Based in Manila, the ADB approved 10.1 billion dollars (6.5 billion euros) in loans, 673 million dollars in grant projects and technical assistance amounting to 243 million dollars last year.
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