During his trip to Paris, Prime Minister Shehbaz met with the president of the Inter-American Development Bank.
The Prime Minister’s’mango diplomacy’ was a show of affability despite the persistent demands for concrete results from the meeting.
The meeting between Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif of ISLAMABAD and Islamic Development Bank (IDB) President Dr. Muhammad Al Jasser took place on the sidelines of the Paris Conference for a New Global Financial Pact on Friday.
As the IDB president walked Prime Minister Shehbaz out of the meeting, the two were spotted shaking hands.
During their talk, Al Jasser admitted to the PM his deep affection for Pakistani mangoes, which the PM agreed to send as a present.
The premier also extended an open invitation to IDB’s president to visit Pakistan whenever he is able.
According to a statement issued by the PM’s Office, the two discussed the ongoing partnership and collaboration between Pakistan and IDB.
They discussed potential new areas of collaboration and reviewed the status of present projects.
On behalf of the government and people of Pakistan, PM Shehbaz thanked Dr. Al Jasser for IDB’s attendance at the International Conference on Climate Resilient Pakistan on January 9, 2023, in Geneva.
He praised the bank for its pledge to pay $4.2 billion to aid Pakistan’s post-flood rehabilitation and singled out the efforts of Dr. Al Jasser as important in securing such a large sum of money.
To help the people of Pakistan restore their lives and livelihoods and to support the government’s sustainable development goals, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif emphasized the importance of the IDB’s beneficial collaboration with Pakistan.
The President of the IDB was also updated on the newly established Special Investment Facilitation Council, which aims to facilitate foreign investments in the country by providing a single point of contact for all investor-related issues.
The Prime Minister is in Paris for the New Global Financing Pact Summit, held on June 22 and 23, at the request of French President Emmanuel Macron.
To maintain lasting peace and harmony across the globe, PM Shehbaz urged the international community to devise a strategy for the fair, equitable, and prudent distribution of resources at the summit.
France, the conference’s host, has billed it as a consensus-building exercise, but world leaders are under pressure to emerge out of the two-day gathering with concrete results as economies falter under mounting debt in the wake of multiple previous crises.
With warnings that keeping global warming below safe limits depends on a huge increase in clean energy investment in developing nations, the summit comes at a time when the magnitude of the financial problems ahead is becoming increasingly apparent.
The International Monetary Fund Director, Kristalina Georgieva, made a major statement on the first day of the summit on Thursday, saying that a pledge to transfer $100 billion of liquidity-boosting “special drawing rights” into a climate and poverty fund had been accomplished.
To help crisis-stricken nations “focus on what matters” and “stop worrying about the bill that’s going to come,” World Bank President Ajay Banga announced that the organization would institute a “pause” mechanism for debt repayments.
In a separate event, a coalition of developed countries and multilateral development banks pledged €2.5 billion ($2.7 billion) to Senegal to assist the west African nation in weaning off of fossil fuels.
The Covid epidemic caused Zambia to default on its debt, but the country’s largest lender, China, and other creditors agreed to restructure $6.3 billion in loans, providing some financial relief.
President Hakainde Hichilema of Zambia hailed the event as a “significant milestone in our journey towards economic recovery & growth” on Twitter.
