Country Partnership Strategy (CPS)

A Country Partnership Strategy (CPS) is the Asian Development Bank's governing document for its engagement with a specific developing member country, setting out the sectors ADB will finance, the development outcomes it targets, and the lending volume it plans to deploy over a three-to-five-year horizon.

What is a Country Partnership Strategy (CPS)?

ADB prepares a CPS for each dmc through a process of dialogue with the national government and consultation with development partners and civil society. The resulting document commits ADB to a set of priority sectors, such as transport, energy, water, education, or health, and links those commitments to a projected lending programme. Individual loans, grants, and technical assistance projects are then designed and approved within the CPS framework, which means the CPS is effectively the forward pipeline for ADB-financed procurement in that country.

For a supplier, the CPS is the earliest-available signal of where significant contracting opportunities will emerge. A CPS that prioritises urban water systems in a given country tells infrastructure firms and engineering consultants that water-sector projects, and therefore related tenders, will be approved and procured in that country over the next several years. The CPS sits above the project-level procurement-plan, which lists specific contracts within an approved project, and above strategic-procurement-planning, which translates sector-level strategy into contracting choices.

Why CPS matters for bidders

Suppliers who read CPS documents can build a two-to-three-year opportunity map well before individual tenders appear. The discipline is to identify the two or three priority sectors in the CPS for your target countries, then monitor ADB's project approval announcements for projects that fit those sectors. By the time a general procurement notice appears, firms that have been tracking the CPS pipeline already understand the project context, have researched local partners, and can submit stronger expressions of interest. Late-stage entry, waiting for the request for proposals, leaves no time to build the sector knowledge that makes proposals credible to evaluation committees.

FAQ

How often is a CPS updated?

A CPS typically covers three to five years, after which ADB conducts a midterm review and eventually prepares a successor strategy. Some CPSs are extended if the development context remains stable.

Are CPS documents publicly available?

Yes. ADB publishes approved CPS documents on adb.org under each country's profile page, along with CPS midterm reviews and completion reports.

Does every DMC have a CPS?

Most do. Smaller Pacific island states sometimes share a regional strategy document rather than an individual CPS, reflecting the limited scale of ADB's engagement in those economies.