By Haruna Gimba
The World Bank says overcoming the economic consequences of the Coronavirus pandemic requires international cooperation and debt reduction in poor countries.
World Bank, President David Malpass, disclosed this to Italian newspaper La Stampa, before the online meeting of the G20 group which held last Friday.
The head of the global finance and development organisation, said some of the countries are seeing a strong recovery now.
“That’s going to help everyone else, we all benefit from that. But in order to actually have a resilient recovery, we need the growth to come from the poorer countries,” Malpass added.
According to him, a key element of poor countries growth is on the debt side, “to have the debt levels become more sustainable, that means they need to be lower.”
He stated that it is important for the countries to channel resources into education, health, and climate.
On vaccination programmes, Malpass said the World Bank was working hard to supply poorer countries and accelerate vaccination there.
“I hope to have more than $3 billion of committed vaccination funding by March and April.”
The G20 finance ministers and central bank governors have met and delibertad via video link on Friday.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently spoke out in favour of increasing the financial clout of the International Monetary Fund to help poorer countries battling the pandemic.
