Istanbul, 23 May 2016

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We at the EIB, the EU Bank, as one of the leading Multilateral Development Banks warmly welcome the commitments of the Group of 7 MDBs announced today to working together with national and international partners to respond to the global forced displacement crisis.

Our response focuses on economic resilience within the context of the “One Humanity” agenda issued by the United Nations. We can contribute substantially and build on our comparative advantages complementing much needed humanitarian aid, such as: 

  • our ability to deploy an extensive range of financing, knowledge and advisory services;
  • our capacity to mobilise and leverage public and private financing;
  • our convening power to create synergies between national and international stakeholders through deeper and wider cooperation. 

To achieve these objectives, we are committed to expand lending, blending and advising so as to promote economic resilience by financing increased infrastructure needs and related services, stimulating entrepreneurship and strengthening education and health systems. 

We are committed to lead where EIB has the expertise and resources to do so and to support other MDBs where they are well placed to do so. It is clear that these tasks are beyond the capacity of any single institution. 

We have great challenges in front of us, today, tackling the consequences, but in particular, the roots of migration. We have set up the Sustainable Development Goals. Last December in Paris we agreed on COP 21. 

We all know that we will not meet the huge needs for finance in order to support the people and providing them with the right infrastructure, with good education, with decent health care, with the prospect of living a better life, we will not meet these needs with our traditional instruments. There is simply not sufficient public money to do so. 

Meeting these challenges will only be possible by maximizing the impact of the scarce resources available and blend these with the abundant private capital. For mobilizing these funds you need institutions like ours whose mandate it is to crowd-in private capital. 

And we need to use modern, intelligent and responsible financial instruments to do this. The EU Bank is already taking concrete steps. Our exposure in the region has surmounted the 40 billion dollar threshold. 

Several financial initiatives are already in place:

  1. The MENA Facility launched by the World Bank Group, the Islamic Development Bank and the UN for which EIB and the other MDBs are reliable implementation partners;
  2. The Crisis Response and Economic Development initiative which the European Investment Bank will present in June in response to the European Council’s invitation to advance a specific initiative aimed at rapidly mobilising additional financing in support of sustainable growth, vital infrastructure and social cohesion in the region.
  3. Support to Turkey in the context of the refugee crisis, in close cooperation with the European Union and other European Financing Institutions. 

We plan to expand the range of products that the EIB can currently offer to respond to urgent needs with three building blocks: 

1)  stepping up further existing activities;

2)  enhance our support to the public sector through concessional and grant financing; and

3)  strengthen support to the private sector through risk and impact finance.

The EIB proposal is an integral part of our global strategy, also covering other regions and addressing root causes for migration as well as other global challenges that are important for the EU such as climate change and Sustainable Development Goals.