Staff Reporter :
The World Bank (WB) is finalizing a plan to provide Bangladesh a sum of $2.7 billion for investment in the country, its president Jim Young Kim said on Thursday.
“We are now just finalizing the plan to sign agreement for worth $2.7 billion of new investments in Bangladesh,” the WB president said while speaking at a round-table with media representatives from eight countries — India, China, Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, Bangladesh, South Africa and Tunisia.
The roundtable was held on the sidelines of the annual Spring Meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington.
Kim said that there has been significant reduction in levels of extreme poverty in Bangladesh. “Poverty level has gone down dramatically from 1990 and even during 2000 -2010,” he said.
The country’s GDP growth has been over 6 per cent for the last five years.
“Though the country has a lot of challenges like many other developing countries, it has had some very, very impressive results. The country now needs to improve power generation,” he added.
The proposed new lending, Kim hoped, just engage very directly with the government and with all of the other players to take Bangladesh to even lower levels of poverty. Besides, he said, we had many other projects going with the government at the same time.
“Our relationship with the government of Bangladesh has always been good, and will continue to be good. There was the one project where we had trouble with and where we disagreed. But that was just one project,” he said.
Describing Bangladesh as a “very important” partner for the World Bank, Kim said the World Bank has zero tolerance for corruption and its stance on this will always remain the same, irrespective of the nature of governments and countries.
“And, just like in the Bangladesh case, because there has been a problem with corruption, doesn’t mean that we break off the relationship. We continue to work with Bangladesh very closely,” he said.
The World Bank has credible evidence corroborated by a variety of sources which points
“I think that again, Bangladesh is a country that has to make use of this democratic dividend, invest in the education of its young people and I think that we really have to face up to the enormity of the challenge of adaptation to climate change in Bangladesh that so much of the land area will be flooded if the seas continue to rise,” he said.
The WB President expressed concern about adaptation to climate change.
“Some of the illustrations that you can see online about what will happen with very small even, changes in the sea level, could be really quite devastating. So, adaptation will be the key. We’re also ready to work with Bangladesh on adaptation to climate change,” Kim said.
