Colombo: Sri Lanka will seek an emergency loan of $ 100 million from the World Bank for the encouragement of Coronavirus vaccination, officials said Wednesday, as a country struggling with the crisis of acute currency.
Pandemic Covid-19 has claimed more than 12,000 lives and was infected with more than half a million people in Sri Lanka, who also suffered food shortages due to cash crunch.
The government said in a statement that the Cabinet had “gave approval to the resolution fisted by the Minister of Health to obtain relevant additional financing facilities” from international lenders.
The statement said the World Bank had indicated the willingness to give money to buy 14 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine and finance “other costs related to vaccination”.
Sri Lanka has pierced a double more than half of 21 million people, mostly with Chinese vaccines, but still in the grip of the main wave Covid-19 since April.
Medical experts said the death toll was much higher than the official figure.
Economy, Shorn from the main tourism sector by Pandemi, shrank by 3.6 percent unprecedented last year.
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa expressed an emergency on August 31 to handle food shortages, because most banks have run out of dollars to finance import.
But he has rejected the call to secure a bailout of the International Monetary Fund when the country faces what is designed by the Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa recently described as a “dangerous foreign exchange crisis”.
The central bank governor Ajith Cabraal said the IMF wanted Sri Lanka to depreciate its currency in return on a bailout, but Colombo could not accept it.
Sri Lanka’s foreign reserves reached $ 3.55 billion in late August while the country had to pay around $ 2 billion in foreign debt before the end of the year.
The main opposition the SJB Party has led a call for the government to find the IMF cash to avoid the default of sovereign debt next year.
Struggling to increase domestic income, the government on Wednesday raised its debt ceiling of 400 billion rupees ($ 2.0 billion) so that they could fulfill their expenses in the next three months.