Best Practices

General Operational Policies*

INTRARREGIONAL TECHNICAL COOPERATION (CT/INTRA)

Definition

Intraregional technical cooperation (CT/INTRA) operations are those whereby one or more institutions in the Bank's borrowing countries provide technical assistance to one or more institutions in another IDB borrowing country.

Objectives

The general purpose is to contribute to the transfer of know-how and technology which could help the economic and social development efforts of the Bank's member countries, as well as to promote cooperation among its borrowing members. The program serves as a vehicle to support and stimulate bilateral cooperation.

The specific objectives are:

• To help broaden and diversify the technical cooperation resources available to each borrowing member country, especially through access to certain experiences and know-how at the regional level that offer comparative advantages.

• To promote better and more intense use of the region's resources - institutional, human, and physical - with the consequent savings in costs.

• To establish ties between national institutions in different countries.

• To provide openings for innovative combinations of efforts designed to identify joint solutions to the countries' common problems.

• To provide additional opportunities for joint identification of new possibilities for bilateral and multinational financial and technical cooperation.

• To promote integration.

Basic Guidelines

SOURCES OF FUNDING. The Bank's contributions to the program are financed by the net income of the Fund for Special Operations. The Board of Executive Directors determines the maximum allowable cost for each operation and authorizes the President to approve the program's operations.

MAXIMUM CONTRIBUTION. The Board of Executive Directors has set the maximum contribution for each operation at US$20,000 or the equivalent thereof.

ELIGIBILITY. All public and private national institutions engaged in development activities are eligible either as beneficiaries or donors.

Regional and international institutions may not be donors to or beneficiaries of this program, but may participate as coordinators of program operations.

Donor institutions may not participate as consultants in technical assistance operations or loans to be financed by the Bank which ensue from the execution of a CT/INTRA operation.

Forms of Assistance

The program may offer assistance in the form of training or advisory services or both.

Operations whose purpose is to contribute to the preparation of supporting documentation for requests for Bank loans or technical cooperation are excluded, unless the donor is or has been the executing agency of a Bank-financed operation.

Prevailing Reference Document: Report of the Restructuring Committee on the Delegation of Authority to the Country Offices, August 1991.

* The operational policies of the Inter-American Development Bank are intended to provide operational guidance to staff in assisting the Bank's borrowing member countries. Over the course of the Bank's more than 40 years of operations, the approach to developing operational policies has taken various forms, ranging from the preparation of detailed guidelines to broad statements of principle and intent. Many policies have not been updated since they were originally issued, and a few reflect emphases and approaches of earlier years which have been superseded by specific mandates of the Bank's Governors, the most recent being the Eighth Replenishment mandates of 1994. In accordance with the Bank's information disclosure policy, the Bank is making all of its operational policies available to the public through the Public Information Center. Users please note that the Bank's operational policies are under a process of continuous review. This review process includes preparation of best practice papers summarizing experience at the Bank and other similar institutions, and sector strategy papers.