By Binta Jaiteh
Abdoulie Jallow, Permanent Secretary Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs has revealed that the World Bank had signed a 68 million dollar budget for the tourism sector, clarifying that though, he was not sure if the announcement was public.
PS Jallow was speaking in Parliament during the presentation of the Ministry report to the Assembly select committee, monitoring and implementation of government projects.
PS Jallow told the Assembly monitoring committee that these were domestic funded projects like the Hakalang project and North Bank road and are externally funded beyond their domain.
He said it was mainly from the World Bank that was about 400 million US Dollars which contains mainly their country allocation coming from their own, and that the allocation of the country and the regional envelope, adding that they also benefited from the regional envelope.
In terms of the funding, Jallow said they are getting this mainly from European Union as their key development partner, which has been a significant provider of aid to the country, noting that most of their funds are external which comes from the Arab Bank for Social and Economic Development (ABSED), organization of oil-exporting countries (OPEC) and the Kuwait Fund.
He revealed that these were the external funders of the roads, but the World Bank is more into digital infrastructure, agriculture, health, and education which are of significant importance.
Ebrima L.S Darboe Aid Director of the Ministry of Finance said that the reduction of consultancy in the country was in order to make the best use of the resources coming to the country, thus some things happen due to lack of capacity in some of the areas or project implementations.
He said, access to support water in the Greater Banjul Areas, this particular finance was signed in 2020 which was supposed to end in 2024, but the donor is a French association and the financing is in the water
