WB offers $500-M emergency loan to Phl

MANILA, Philippines - The World Bank is offering $500 million in emergency loan as well as technical expertise to the Philippines to help in the rehabilitation of Yolanda-ravaged areas and in rebuilding the lives of traumatized survivors.

“We are committed to supporting the government in its effort to recover and rebuild, and to help Filipinos strengthen their resilience against increasingly frequent extreme weather events,” World Bank Group president Jim Yong Kim said in a statement.

The technical team will help the government assess typhoon damage as well as gather necessary information to help in a comprehensive reconstruction plan.

World Bank vice president for East Asia Pacific Axel van Trotsenburg said the Philippines would need a long-term reconstruction plan for the devastated areas, particularly Leyte and Samar.

“We can bring lessons learned from our work in reconstruction after disasters hit Aceh, Haiti, and other areas that might be helpful in the Philippines,” Van Trotsenburg said.

The technical team will use remote sensing imaging equipment for its geo-mapping activities to help determine the extent as well as the cost of destruction wrought by Yolanda.

The multilateral agency will also provide technical assistance to help communities come up with disaster resistant design options for housing, health facilities, schools and public markets capable of withstanding 250-280 kilometer per hour wind speed, as well as severe flooding.

The World Bank Group said it is ready to provide additional support for affected families, including through the conditional cash transfer (CCT) program of the government originally intended for the so-called poorest of the poor.

World Bank help may be used for providing temporary shelters for displaced families, cleaning up debris, or providing short-term jobs to poor families.

Budget adjustment

With a massive rehabilitation task on the horizon, Budget Secretary Florencio Abad is hinting at the need for a restructuring of the budget program for 2014, saying the P7.5-billion calamity fund appropriated for the year “will not suffice.”

“So we will have to reconsider that – double it or triple it – but it really depends on where we can draw the space to increase the budget for the calamity fund,” he told a news briefing in Malacañang yesterday.

“There is a proposal to just set up a rehabilitation and reconstruction fund for the Yolanda damage, that is something that we are looking at, and see how we can put this in the budget,” Abad explained. 

“I don’t think that the budget process can wait for an assessment to come. So therefore we do have to inject flexibilities within the program appropriations and anticipate in the unprogrammed appropriations how much more funds we need,” he said.

He said Cabinet officials would be asked to give inputs on how “we can accommodate eventually the requirements of rehabilitation and reconstruction.”

Abad said that since the President does not want any delay in the passage of the 2014 budget, the executive would have to work closely with the Senate, which is fine-tuning its version of the appropriations program.

“We will have to operate within the time constraints of the current budget schedule. We will take advantage of the rest of the days that it will be in session to be able to introduce those changes that we need to make, to accommodate the requirements of the rehabilitation and reconstruction in the future,” he said.

Abad’s stand is likely to be welcomed by a budget watchdog which is urging the Senate and the House of Representatives to tweak the 2014 national budget to make sure enough funds are set aside for disaster preparedness, as well as for relief and reconstruction.

In a statement, the Alternative Budget Initiative (ABI) said Congress “should allot funds to enhance the resiliency and adaptive capacities of communities and effectively respond to the country’s vulnerability to impacts of climate change and disasters.” – With Jess Diaz, Delon Porcalla, Rhodina Villanueva