The agricultural and small business sectors in Guyana are expected to be the main beneficiaries of the 9th cycle of the Caribbean Development Bank’s Basic Needs Trust Fund (BNTF), which was officially launched yesterday by Finance Minister Winston Jordan.
Jordan, according to the Department of Public Information, said the grants will continue to be assigned to projects “that contribute to poverty reduction through intensive and sustainable economic growth.”
According to Bernard Lord, Chairman of the Oversight Unit of the BNTF, the project is worth US$7.3M, with US$6.1 M coming from the CDB and US$1.2M from Government Counterpart Financing.
The last cycle benefitted several individuals and organisations, one such association is the Guyana Society for the Blind.
Representative of the Society for the Blind, Ganesh Singh said his organisation, with assistance from the BNTF, was able to acquire equipment benefitting blind students and enabling them to write the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate examination. “With all of this we’ve had 30 students completing CXC and those are students without our intervention and the support of the BNTF would have been at home and not having a future” he said, according to DPI.
