Alghadeer TV Alghadeer TV
In response to the devastating impact of the coronavirus pandemic on developing countries, the World Bank Group (WBG) deployed more than $157 billion over the last 15 months, the Emirates News Agency (WAM) reported on Tuesday.
From April 2020 to the end of June 2021 the WBG sent countries around the world aid to tackle the economic, health, and social impacts induced by the pandemic, WAM said.
The $157 donations make it the largest crisis response in the organization’s history.
The crisis response also represented an increase of over 60 percent during the 15-month period, compared to its responses before the pandemic’s onset.
During the fiscal year of 2021 alone (July 2020 to end-June 2021), the WBG’s commitments and mobilizations amounted to around $110 billion.
“Since the start of the pandemic, the World Bank Group has committed or mobilized a record $157 billion in new financing, an unprecedented level of support for an unprecedented crisis,” said World Bank Group President David Malpass, according to WAM.
“… we must do more still. I remain deeply concerned about the limited availability of vaccines for developing countries, which are critical to saving lives and livelihoods,” he added.
In 2020, global extreme poverty experienced significant growth for the first time in over 20 years, pushing around 100 million into extreme poverty, WAM reported.
The global economy is now expected to expand by around 5.6 percent this year. However, the recovery seems to be uneven so far, with many of the world’s poorest countries still grappling with pandemic-induced economic deterioration.
About 90 percent of the world’s more advanced economies are expected to regain their pre-pandemic per capita income levels by 2022, WAM reported. But this isn’t the case for emerging and developing economies as only one-third of them are projected to do the same.
