WB gives $257m to develop infrastructure under IPFF

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FE Report
The World Bank (WB) has approved to provide US$ 257 million under its Investment Promotion and Financing Facility (IPFF) project for facilitating local infrastructure development, especially for building small power plants.
The fund would help implement several Private-Public Partnership (PPP) projects for setting up small power plants and for capacity building of the government agencies and other PPP stakeholders to build a national PPP pipeline and framework.
The multilateral donor agency approved the fund last week, under which it would support Bangladesh Bank (BB), the implementing agency of the project, to expand the scope of funding for financing the PPP ventures in a wide range of infrastructure sectors, scaling up the current successful experience in the power sector.
The IPFF project of the WB has already financed seven fully operational small power plants to generate a total of 178 megawatts (mw) of electricity. Of the plants, private entrepreneur Doreen Power built four plants at Tangail, Feni, Mohipal and Narsingdi, having the generation capacity of 22mw, 22mw, 11mw and 22mw respectively.
Maloncho Power built two plants at Dhaka Export Processing Zone and Chittagong Export Processing Zone, having the electricity generation capacity of 35mw and 44mw respectively. The remaining plant was built by Regent Power at Barabkunda in Chittagong to generate 22mw of electricity.
The project is expected to increase additional financing to infrastructure sectors by over $400 million, leveraging about cent per cent private resources. It is expected to facilitate various infrastructure developments in the power sector, like - renewable energy and energy savings, as well as bridges, ports, container terminals, water treatment plants, waste disposal projects, and others.
The increased infrastructure will create or help maintain jobs during the economic slowdown, and remove bottlenecks in economic growth caused by existing infrastructure shortages.
The maturity period of the WB fund is 40 years with 10 years grace period.