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World Bank to loan Egypt 500 mln USD on housing program

Xinhua, June 11, 2015 Adjust font size:

Egypt and the World Bank signed on Wednesday an agreement on a loan of 500 million U.S. dollars to be specified for the country's social housing project, official MENA news agency reported.

The agreement was signed by Egyptian Housing Minister Mostafa Madbouli and World Bank's vice president for Middle East and North Africa Hafez Ghanem. The ceremony was also attended by Egypt's Prime Minister Ibrahim Mahlab and World Bank chief Jim Yong Kim.

The deal was inked at Egypt's resort city of Sharm El-Sheikh on the sidelines of Wednesday's 26-nation summit attended by leaders and representatives from the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), the East African Community (EAC) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

Housing has always been one of the pressing problems over the past few decades in the most populous Arab country, where some 40 percent of its 90-million population live under the poverty.

The government is trying to relieve the situation through the "one-million-apartment" national project that is designed to build one million apartments within five years to serve the youth and low-income people in particular.

The project is carried out by the state as part of a social housing program and the Egyptian government is currently working on 250,000 housing units and will soon deliver 70,000 of them.

"This is the biggest housing project adopted by a country in the Middle East and one of the biggest three housing projects in the whole world; that a country builds one million housing units in five years," the Egyptian minister told Xinhua in a recent interview. Endit