12 billion US dollars are already requested by Lebanese officials t from the international community to invest in development of local infrastructure. This spending on infrastructure over the next seven years is essentail to deal with the huge presence of Syrian refugees in the country.
Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s adviser on Syrian refugees said : “We estimate that we need around $1.5 billion in investments in infrastructure each year. The Council of Development and Reconstruction is working on a master plan for the needs of Lebanon and we will send this report to the international community, World Bank and other international banks to obtain long-term loans with a 1.4 percent interest only.”
On April 5, representatives from 70 national delegations, major donors and humanitarian and development organizations met in Brussels to raise funds for countries hosting Syrian refugees. At the conference, Hariri urged the international community to finance major infrastructure projects in Lebanon to ease the refugees’ impact.
International donors made a “collective pledge of $6 billion for this year alone,” EU Humanitarian Aid Commissioner Christos Stylianides said during the conference.
Munla described the plan to draw loans and grants for this project as a complete vision for Lebanon over the next seven years.
“It really started at the London conference a year ago with the previous government when the Syrian crisis entered its sixth year. The international community started looking at the crisis not only from a humanitarian angle but also from [the] civilization and development of the host community toward stabilization and development [angle],” he added.
The international community and organizations, Munla said, created a mechanism called the Global Concessional Financing Facility. “The purpose of this facility was to provide long-term concessional loans to the host communities for mainly infrastructure projects,” he explained.
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