The World Bank stands ready to advise the Government of Georgia on developing 10-Year Strategic Plans. It was announced by the Prime Minister of Georgia at a Joint Press Briefing held with Anna Bjerde, Vice President of the World Bank for Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region today.

“I welcome our distinguished guest - Anna Bjerde, Vice President of the World Bank - who is visiting Georgia today. I have had a productive meeting with Anna, discussing the utterly successful cooperation that Georgia has with the World Bank. We reviewed our projects, the most significant portfolio that the World Bank is managing in our country. I wish to remind you that the total volume of the exposure is 2.7 billion USD, which has been allocated over years for the financing of around 70 projects in various sectors of the economy. Currently, the value of the 13 active projects of the World Bank amounts to about a billion USD, which is a significant contribution to the economy of our country. I wish to note with gratitude the engagement of the World Bank in almost every direction, including the infrastructure, agriculture, education. We talked about the needs of vocational education and more efforts to be channeled towards this end. Also, we discussed energy, digital technologies that we are jointly working and cooperating on. We shared our vision with Anna on the development of short- and long-term plans. Government has been actively working in recent months towards this end. We already have the first draft of the document, which will be made available inter alia to our most successful donor - the World Bank - and I asked her to actively get engaged in this process so that we get more advice and consultations towards this end to define directions of all sectors - policy directions of our Government - with greater precision. It applies to the development of 10-Year Strategic Plans and I received a positive response from Anna on this, noting that the World Bank stands ready to provide advice to the Government inter alia towards this end.

You may well be aware that the World Bank was one of the main donors during the pandemic and remains to be a significant partner in this process. We are actively supported by the World Bank in the vaccination process, in the acquisition of vaccines and I wish to publicly thank the World Bank for this. We have successfully negotiated directly with the manufacturers - Pfizer and others - and received vaccines from the COVAX platform as well - AstraZeneca, first lot of Pfizer. We are now expecting vaccines of Chinese manufacturing, which are authorized by the World Health Organization and we are working successfully towards this end. Thus, we once again summarized a wide range and area of successful cooperation over years”, - said Irakli Garibashvili.