$137.6m financing deal with WB Sunday

The government will sign a financing agreement with the World Bank (WB) Sunday for an amount of $137.60 million to facilitate investment in growth centres for value addition and job creation in the Bangladesh economy, reports UNB. Under the agreement, the WB will provide $ 120 million as soft loan while the UK's Department for International Development (DFID) would provide $ 17.60 million as a grant to Bangladesh for the Private Sector Development Support Project (PSDSP), said sources at the Economic Relations Division (ERD). ERD Secretary M Musharraf Hossain Bhuiyan and WB Country Director Ellen Goldstein will sign the agreement on behalf of the government and the WB respectively at the ERD in city's Sher-e-Bangla Nagar area. The proposed Kaliakoir Hi-Tech Park and Comilla EPZ will be implemented through the project. The implementation period of the project would be July 2011 to June 2016. The BEPZA and Economic Zones Authority under the Prime Minister' s Office (PMO) and Ministry of Science and ICT will act as the implementing agencies. The loan will be received in standard terms and conditions of the International Development Association (IDA), which includes a 0.75 per cent service charge on the disbursed amount. The repayment period for the loan is 40 years, including a 10-year grace period. The project will provide investments in developing infrastructures that are not funded by the private sector. There will be three components to the project. The first component will support the identification of suitable locations for Special Economic Zones (SEZs). These site assessments would study the physical and social infrastructures, market demands and the social and economic returns of the sites. In this regard, feasibility studies of at least two locations in each of the southeast, southwest and northwest regions of the country would be conducted. The second component would aim at financing off-site investments for SEZ sites. The third component would help strengthen the linkages between firms to be located in the SEZ sites and those located outside the SEZ sites.