WB denies reallocating funds from youth to Syrian refugees projects

In its edition of Saturday, An Nahar daily reported that the World Bank (WB) has suspended the financing of the ‘first time job for youth’ program agreed in 2012 with the Lebanese government through the state-run National Employment Office (NEO) (LBP 10 billion for the first phase). The pretext for the WB, the newspaper said, was the delay in the launch of the program twice for reasons of incomplete administrative and legal procedures. While justifying the right of the international institution to take the decision it deems fit, An Nahar explained that the delay was not due to a bad performance by NEO, but rather due to a disagreement on the funding mechanism between the government and the WB. The newspaper pointed out that the World Bank’s decision came within the framework of inbound global initiatives to employ a larger number of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, and hence the deferral of funds from the local hosting communities to displaced Syrians, with a total disregard to the exceptionally high rate of unemployment among Lebanon’s youth. An Nahar criticized the WB which, An Nahar said, has turned its offices in Beirut into an agency for marketing Syrian workforce. On the other hand, the World Bank denied categorically all the allegations by An Nahar on reallocating the funds to Syrian refugees. In this respect, the officer for Human Development Program at the World Bank, Hanin Sayid, clarified to the Daily Star newspaper that the funds have not been channeled to any refugee project whatsoever. (An Nahar, The Daily Star, December 3 and 5, 2016)