Members of Parliment during the budget debates in the National AssemblyThe government says it is putting measures in place to ensure that its use of funds, whether from multilateral agencies or oil and gas, is utilised in a fair and transparent manner.
Finance Minister Winston Jordan on Thursday confirmed that the new framework document is being prepared with assistance from the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) and other donors, for public-private partnerships. This document will be laid before the National Assembly on April 26.
He explained that the Government will begin applying these actions to the US $900M funding envelope provided by the Islamic Development Bank (IDB). This is the largest loan ever provided by a multilateral lending agency to Guyana. The minister sought to put this into perspective during a recent media brief.
“I can say our new resource envelope with the Inter-American Development Bank is about US$38M or somewhere around there. Our resource envelope with the World Bank is US$90M. Our resource envelope with the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) is US$100M. Most of which will be used to blend with the UK CIF (Caribbean Infrastructure Partnership Funds) resources to do the first phase of the Linden-Lethem Road”, Minister Jordan is quoted as saying.
The Finance Minister added that even with the resource envelope of US$20M provided by OPEC Fund for International Development (OFID) added to the aforementioned, the funds are not sufficient to build the new Demerara Harbour Bridge, for example.
Guyana’s needs, Minister Jordan explained, far exceed what multilateral agencies can offer presently, “While we are thankful for the assistance we are getting from multi-lateral banks, it’s not going to fetch us or even bring us into the 20th century even though we are already into it. We have to find any number of ways of financing our development, any number of ways and we need huge sums of money.”
