LAHORE: Asian Development Bank (ADB) Vice President Ying Ming Yang has appreciated Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif’s vision and the pace of public service delivery in Punjab, with the provincial government and the development bank agreeing to expand cooperation across clean drinking water, agriculture, technical skills, health and education.
According to an official statement issued following the engagement, the understanding was reached during a meeting between the Chief Minister and the ADB Vice President held on Sunday. The Chief Minister welcomed Ying Ming Yang and thanked him for his visit, while the ADB Vice President expressed appreciation for the warm hospitality extended to the delegation.
The statement said the meeting discussed ADB support for cardiac, children’s and cancer hospitals in Punjab, three categories of tertiary care that carry some of the heaviest patient loads in the province. Nursing education also figured in the discussion, an area that has drawn increasing policy attention as Punjab’s new hospital capacity comes online and demand for trained clinical staff rises alongside it.
“Health projects are among our priorities and will be completed soon to facilitate the people,” the Chief Minister said.
The Chief Minister thanked the bank for organising the Punjab Agri-Food Investment Forum, an event positioned to connect provincial agricultural output with private capital. The two sides also discussed three concessional loan agreements intended to help farmers purchase agricultural machinery, a financing route that typically lowers borrowing costs for smallholders who are otherwise priced out of mechanisation.
She described the Punjab Economic Transformation Plan as a game changer for agricultural improvement and economic growth, adding that the provincial government was focusing on increasing cultivation of oilseeds, pulses and fruits, besides improving agricultural financing and cold-chain facilities. Cold storage remains a persistent gap in Pakistan’s food supply chain, where post-harvest losses erode farmer earnings before produce reaches the market.
“Punjab is Pakistan’s food basket and, with its growing workforce, is also emerging as a hub of industrial development,” she said.
Discussions also covered the establishment of STEM laboratories in government schools, part of a broader push to align classroom instruction with technical and vocational demand. Technical skills development was listed among the agreed areas of expanded cooperation between the province and the bank.
The Chief Minister said all projects in Punjab were progressing rapidly and that another 2,000 electric buses, with ADB support, would be operating on the province’s roads by next year. The commitment builds on Punjab’s ongoing shift toward electrified mass transit in a province where urban air quality and fuel import costs have both become recurring policy pressures.
The Chief Minister said the provincial government wanted to further strengthen Pakistan’s strong and long-term partnership with the ADB. She said the government was pursuing a broad reform agenda focused on good governance, improved service delivery, economic recovery and growth.
Under the Punjab Investment and Value-Oriented Transformation (PIVOT) initiative, she said, the government was working to promote value addition, exports, skills development and private-sector investment in the province.
Multilateral lenders such as the ADB remain a principal source of concessional financing for provincial infrastructure and social sector projects in Pakistan, and a vice-presidential visit typically signals movement on project pipelines rather than a single approval. The areas identified in Sunday’s meeting, from tertiary hospitals and nursing education to farm mechanisation loans and electric buses, suggest continuity in the bank’s Punjab portfolio across both hard infrastructure and human development, with implementation timelines likely to become clearer as individual agreements are formalised.
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