The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) is poised to provide Guyana with a $73.5M loan to support the development of road projects specifically as it pertains to strengthening the country’s climate resilience.
The project is expected to create capacity and assist a local counterpart technical team within the Ministry of Public Works (to be called the Works Service Group) to lead project preparation in socio-environmental aspects, gender, project engineering and traffic management services.
Guyana Standard previously reported that the Government of Guyana has embarked on a large investment effort to upgrade and revamp infrastructure in the country, which consists of interventions in the case of transport of critical coverage, capacity and quality upgrades of its road network. This includes actions for rehabilitation, improvement, conservation, as well as strengthening the capacities of the authorities.
The IDB said given the project’s intention to ultimately support the government’s agenda, it will require a presentation by the beneficiary of a set of studies on the feasibility of the programme, the socioenvironmental management frameworks that are required for compliance with the policies of environmental and social safeguards, among others. Several of these studies will be financed by this loan. It will also finance studies on crosscutting themes such as gender, adaptation to climate change, and technology among others.
At the request of the beneficiary, the Bank will be the executing agency of this loan for Technical Cooperation (TC). This execution is justified by the financial institution’s experience with the preparation and development of the operational and technical instruments proposed and its competence to be able to better coordinate with other activities for project preparation of the said loan.
Furthermore, the TC will be executed by the Bank through the hiring of consultants to carry out each study. In this sense, the Bank will be responsible for: identifying the studies and technical work necessary to structure the project, selecting and hiring consultants to provide the necessary services, and managing the execution and delivery of consulting services. These activities will be carried out in coordination with the ministry.
