Facilitating Evidence-Based Policy Making During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Kyrgyz Republic

Rajesh Vasudevan, senior economist at the Asian Development Bank describes the four-step approach adopted by his team to (i) assess in real-time anticipated socioeconomic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Kyrgyz Republic, a small landlocked country in Central Asia, and (ii) build an evidence-base to inform the crisis-response measures of the Government and to ensure equitable allocation of COVID-19 response funds that it had started to mobilize from different sources of financing including development partners, starting with the ADB.