Head of PAC’s Public Policy Research Group, Dr. Kala Seetharam Sridhar, was invited by the Asian Development Bank to attend the launch of their 2009 MDG Report ‘A Future Within Reach, 2009: Achieving the Millennium Development Goals in an Era of Uncertainty’ held in Manila on the 17^th February, 2010. The launch event was followed by a workshop on ‘MDGs beyond 2015’ the following day.

Several notable observations were made during the 2-day event, including:

• The need to make further note of urban dimensions to the problems of poverty and sanitation given the relative ease of addressing such concerns in urban environments compared to rural. This reaffirmed analyses highlighted in the 2009 report that the rural areas in the regions progressed much more slowly than the urban areas.
• There is a need to incorporate rural-urban dimensions in the various MDG indicators the ADB are planning to look at in the forthcoming 2010 report due to the different methods by which the same broad-based phenomena (e.g. poverty or climate change) manifests itself on communities in these contexts; and
• In future reports, more attention may need to be paid to *outcome* rather than to *spending* alone.

The 2009 ADB-ESCAP-UNDP Regional MDG report is available here. We sincerely Thank the ADB for this opportunity to engage and contribute to issues of regional development.