African Development Bank approves a loan of 288.5 million dollars to Nigeria.
According to a press statement released on Friday by AFDB senior director – Ebrima Faal, more than 111.7 billion Naira have been approved as loan by the African development bank for Nigeria to help them tackle corona virus, improve their emergency response to the virus and to also help improve the economy, and reduce the negative effect of the fall in oil prices, to the common Nigerians. According to the press state, the loan is the Bank’s first response in a bid to stop the fall in oil prices and its possible effect on the Nigerian economy.
The proposed program is to ensure the country’s financial position and economy is strong enough to survive the shock from covid-19, by limiting the negative effect on people’s lives and the economy generally.
Nigeria, been the most populated nation in African and the continent’s largest oil producers, have been faced with serious health epidemic caused by covid-19 and economic meltdown caused by the global crash in oil prices. As at yesterday, the 5th of June, 2020 the country has through its center for disease control (NCDC) reported a total of 11,516 confirmed cases of covid-19, with 3,535 recoveries and 323 deaths.
Before now, statistics had shown that about 40.1% of Nigerian live below the poverty line of $1.90 per day, and the current fall in household income during the pandemic will result in more loss of wealth for both the public and private sector workers, which .
This is not the first loan from AFDB, as the country got a loan approval of US 70 million dollar loan for the construction of a road project in the southeast of Nigeria, Ebonyi state, on April 24th, 2019.
During this covid-19 period, in addition to the recent loan approval of US$288.5 this June 2020, Nigeria received a loan of US$3.4 Billion from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in April 2020 and a donation of €50 million from European Union in April 2020.
