Finance Minister AMA Muhith has said the World Bank would provide funds for Bangladesh’s new transportation development programmes such as the bus rapid transportation project and excess from its innovative fund-raising.
“Newly appointed World Bank Vice-President for South Asia Philippe Le Houérou has assured the Bangladesh delegation of funds for new development projects,” Muhith told the Dhaka Tribune on Friday in Washington DC, USA, after meeting with Houérou.
The World Bank vice-president also told the finance minister that they would provide $300m for the government’s food preservation project, which was supposed to start this December but has been delayed until January next year.
Muhith said the World Bank would also provide funds for poverty alleviation, climate change and power sector projects.
The finance minister is now in Washington DC to attend a board meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
He informed the Dhaka Tribune that the fund disbursement from World Bank’s International Development Association would double from next year.
“We have already broken the myth of child marriage in Bangladesh and the World Bank will not take up any new projects in this sector,” he said.
The government would also get the excess from the World Bank’s innovative fund-raising for the education sector as the country’s primary education enrolment had reached 1.5m making Bangladesh the leader in the field, he said.
Muhith said Bangladesh was also the leader in poverty reduction rate and according to Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics the country’s poverty cut would stand at 26.31% in 2015 from 31.51% in 2010.
He said a rate of 4% cut in five years would be “extremely good for a country like Bangladesh.”
A World Bank report on Bangladesh says the country is on track towards reaching its poverty reduction target under the MDGs and it will halve the poverty headcount to 28.5% sometime this year.
Regarding the disbursement of the fourth tranche of the Extended Credit Facility (ECF), the finance minister said the IMF had been satisfied with the reform programmes taken by the government and the disbursement of $130m was supposed to be in November.
Muhith, however, criticised the IMF team that had visited Bangladesh to review the third tranche for advising the government to stop labour unrest and disaster in the garment sector for a stable growth. He mentioned that it had taken the British government 100 years to improve the labour standard of its garment sector.