This commemorative book celebrates 10 years of productive collaboration under the Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation (CAREC) Program. Under CAREC, its member countries have made significant gains in regional transport, energy infrastructure, and trade facilitation and policy, which have increased both the pace and quality of development in the subregion. The spirit of trust and confidence that has evolved through the years among good neighbors and good partners has led to better prospects for all.

Mongolia's growth is set to accelerate in the next decade, as its vast mining resources start to be put into large-scale production. This has greatly improved its prospects for prosperity and poverty reduction. However, to realize its full potential, Mongolia will need to transform its society, economy, and administration. This report discusses how the context of road sector policy and road infrastructure investments will change, and the ways the sector can best prepare to fulfill its new role. Given the country's road infrastructure needs, the road sector will be expected to implement massive highway investments in a short time and then to consistently maintain the new highways at a high standard. However, Mongolia's current small-scale road sector will unlikely have the capacity to scale up and deliver upon such expectations without extensively modernizing its financing mechanisms, business processes, organization, and education systems. This report therefore argues that Mongolia's government needs to implement a comprehensive capacity development program for the road sector for about 5 years. This study looks into the sector's financial dimension, the techniques and processes followed for road maintenance and construction, and the role of human resources management and education. It tries to understand why sector performance improvement has been slow, even though many sector issues and apparent solutions have been considered in the past. Reflecting on lessons from international experience, it outlines a range of policy options for decision makers and proposes an agenda until 2016.

Rapid gender assessments of 12 projects in four countries were undertaken as part of the Asian Development Bank’s commitment to improving aid effectiveness. The assessment of three loans in Mongolia found that positive gender equality results were achieved due to the implementation of a gender action plan in one project and a gender mainstreaming approach in another. Comparing approaches between the three projects demonstrated that paying attention to gender differences during design and implementation produced better results for women, enhanced the quality of project implementation, and contributed directly to achieving loan outcomes and improved project effectiveness. This report discusses the gender equality results achieved for each project, summarizes factors that enhanced the quality of project design and implementation, and makes recommendations to maximize gender equity as a driver of change.