The head of the Asian Development Bank, Haruhiko Kuroda, was in Uzbekistan on February 16 meeting with President Karimov in February, promising new loans and intensified cooperation.  Wonder if this means continued carte blanche to abuse children? Uzbekistan has already received loans from the bank totaling more than 1.2 billion USD.  The great irony is that while agriculture (especially irrigation) is the target of much of the ADB’s lending, improving the quality of primary education  is the other.  You might think that encouraging the government to actually allow children to attend primary school would be an obvious step in that direction–that is, unless you were the ADB.  So much for the ADB’s mission of “fighting poverty.”