| 28/07/2010 09:48 |
Donors pledge $1.1 bn for Kyrgyzstan
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International donors on Tuesday pledged $1.1 billion in aid to help rebuild ex-Soviet Kyrgyzstan after last month’s wave of deadly ethnic unrest, a World Bank official said.
The aid was announced by Theodore Ahlers, the World Bank’s director for strategy and operations, at an international donor conference held in the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek.
“The donors have today pledged a total amount of $1.1 billion for the next 30 months for the Kyrgyz Republic and of this amount about $600 million is earmarked for the remaining months of 2010,” Ahlers said. The announcement was a major boost for struggling Kyrgyzstan, an impoverished Central Asian state which has been plagued by violence since the ousting of president Kurmanbek Bakiyev in bloody street protests in April.
Kyrgyz Finance Minister Chorobek Imashev had earlier in the day appealed for $1.2 billion, warning that the country faced a contracting economy on top of the cost of reconstruction across the devastated south of the country.
“According to our economic forecasts, the republic’s gross domestic product (GDP) will have contracted by 5.4 percent by the end of the year,” he told the representatives from more than 25 countries and international financial institutions. “The total demand for financing is more than $1.2 billion,” he added.
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