The UN and World Bank will increase financing for the refugee crisis

The UN and World Bank will increase financing for the Middle East and North Africa to help countries there deal with millions of refugees that is the result of the conflicts in the area. They did not put a sum on the initiative, but said it would ramp up resources to deal with the “enormous humanitarian and economic toll” that conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere are taking on the region.

“The world today is witness to… the highest level of forced displacement since the Second World War,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said in a statement.

“To address the scale and the nature of the conflicts, we need new approaches. It is important that the World Bank, as a close partner to the UN, and other international financial institutions, mainstream and actively invest in conflict-affected states.”

The new loans will come in two forms, said the organizations, under the first mechanism, guarantees from donor countries will be leveraged to issue special bonds, including Islamic sukuk bonds, which are specially structured to comply with the Koranic prohibition on charging interest. In the second, donor country grants will be used to extend lowinterest loans to the countries hosting the bulk of the more than 15 million refugees who have fled the region’s conflicts in the past four years.

“Strong global partnerships and innovative financing are essential to meet the scale of the need in these hard-hit countries,” said World Bank president Jim Yong Kim.