The World Bank’s Board of Executive Directors on June 26 approved a $200 million credit from the International Development Association (IDA) to increase agricultural productivity and diversification and enhance market access for Myanmar farmers, with a strong focus on inclusion for smallholder farmers, women and other vulnerable groups.
According to the Myanmar Economic Monitor, released by the World Bank yesterday, economic growth is estimated to drop from 6.8 percent in FY18/19 to just 0.5 percent in FY2019/20, with significant downside risks.
Agriculture is the source of livelihood for nearly 70 percent of the population and accounts for nearly 30 percent of national GDP and merchandise exports. It is the main sector of employment for the poor with 85 percent of the rural population living in a household with one or more members engaged in agriculture.
“Poverty among agricultural households could increase by two to four million people if incomes continue to decline for another three to six months due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Mariam Sherman, World Bank Country Director for Myanmar, Cambodia and Lao PDR.
It is estimated that the project will reach about 560,000 beneficiaries, of whom 220,000 are women.
The World Bank in April this year provided a $50 million loan for the Myanmar COVID-19 Emergency Response Project to help Myanmar fill a critical gap in its contingency plan to urgently increase hospital preparedness and surge capacity in order to reduce the spread of COVID-19, protect health workers, and treat patients.
Myanmar also receives an $8 million grant from the World Bank Group’s Global Pandemic Emergency Facility (PEF) to support surge response in the health sector, with special attention on benefiting the most vulnerable groups and communities in conflict-affected areas and ethnic health providers.
Written by Tazer Bhone Myint/ Translated by Min
မြန်မာနိုင်ငံ စိုက်ပျိုးမွေးမြူ
တောင်သူလယ်သမားများ စို
မြေယာအနည်းငယ်သာ ပိုင်ဆိုင်လုပ်
ကမ္ဘာ့ဘဏ်၏ မြန်မာ့စီးပွားရေးစော
တိုင်းပြည်လူဦးရေ ၇ဝ ရာခိုင်နှုန်း၏ အသက်မွေးဝမ်းကြောင်းအလုပ်ဖြစ်သော စိုက်ပျိုးမွေး
ကမ္ဘာ့ဘဏ်က စီမံကိန်းကြောင့် လူဦးရေ ၅၆ဝ,ဝဝဝ အကျိုးခံစာခွင့်ရှိမည်ဟု မျှော်မှန်းထားသည့်အနက် အမျိုးသမီး ၂၂ဝ,ဝဝဝ ခန့် ပါဝင်မည်ဟု သိရသည်။
