Fund to fight poverty in Asia proposed

A group photo shows Arab and Asian leaders before the opening ceremony of the first Asia Co-operation Dialogue (ACD) summit at Bayan Palace in Kuwait City yesterday. Opening the summit, Kuwait’s Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmed al-Sabah proposed setting up a $2bn fund to fight poverty in Asia and said the Gulf state will donate $300mn to its corpus. Sheikh Sabah proposed that a pan-Asian development agency, like the Asian Development Bank, manage the programme that will finance development projects in the least developed Asian nations. The two-day summit will discuss a variety of issues including energy supply, food security, financing of projects, IT and development of human resources. It will also review the promotion of investments in Asian countries, especially by sovereign wealth funds