BEIRUT — Crisis-hit Lebanon has secured $5.4
billion in aid over three years from the UN’s
World Food Program (WFP),
Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister Najib Mikati announced Monday.
اضافة اعلان
The country has been mired since 2019 in a financial
crisis dubbed by the World Bank as one of the worst in recent history.
“The WFP executive board has decided in its latest
meeting in Rome to allocate $5.4 billion to
Lebanon over the next three years,”
Mikati told a press conference in Beirut alongside the agency’s representative
in Lebanon, Abdallah Alwardat.
According to the
premier, the aid money will be “shared equally” by Lebanese citizens and Syrian
refugees.
Around 2 million Syrian refugees are in Lebanon.
Nearly 830,000 of them are registered with the UN.
WFP schemes have supported Syrian refugees in
Lebanon since 2012, when large numbers of them began fleeing the war that
started a year earlier in their home country.
The WFP “will continue to provide emergency
assistance in kind and in cash,” Alwardat said.
The new aid package would support “a million Syrian
refugees and a million Lebanese” between 2023 and 2025, he added.
Lebanon’s financial meltdown has caused poverty rates to
reach more than 80 percent of the Lebanese population, as food prices have
risen by 2,000 percent, according to the UN.
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