MB approves $178.1M in Q3 borrowings for nutrition project

The Monetary Board (MB) green lit for the third quarter this year just $178.1 million in public-sector foreign borrowing, which is intended to fund the national government’s multisectoral nutrition project.

This financial obligation availed from the World Bank was 95-percent lower than the $3.54 billion approved in the second quarter, which covered the continuing need to address the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), MB-approved loans for the third quarter were also 96-percent lower compared to the $4.66 billion that was approved in the same quarter of 2021.

In June, the World Bank’s board of executive directors approved the loan intended to support the delivery of nutrition and health-care services at the primary care and community levels to help reduce stunting.

In particular, the support is focused on stunting cases —characterized by prolonged nutritional deficiency among infants and young children—that are observed in 235 towns known to have high incidence of poverty and malnutrition.

Ndiamé Diop, World Bank country director for Brunei, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand, said the persistence of high levels of childhood undernutrition in the Philippines, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, could lead to a significant increase in inequality of opportunities in the Philippines.

“Where healthy children can do well in school and look forward to a prosperous future, stunted children tend to be sickly, learn less, more likely to drop out of school and their economic productivity as adults can be clipped by more than 10 percent in their lifetime,” Diop said.

“Hence, improving the nutritional status of children is key to the country’s goals of boosting human capital while strengthening the country’s economic recovery and prospects for long-term growth,” he added.

The project is designed to deliver a package of nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive interventions across the various local government platforms together with a social behavior change and communications interventions.

Through the project, households with pregnant women and children under two years will benefit from high-impact nutrition interventions including infant and young feeding, regular growth monitoring, multiple micronutrient supplements for children 6 to 23 months, iron-folic acid supplementation for pregnant women, vitamin A supplementation for children, dietary supplementation for nutritionally-at-risk pregnant women and treatment of moderate and severe acute malnutrition.

The Philippine Constitution requires that prior approval by the highest policy-making body of the BSP for all foreign loans that the public sector—the national government itself as well as its agencies and financial institutions—will take or guarantee.

Also, before actual negotiations can begin, proposals for foreign borrowings must be submitted to the Monetary Board for approval-in-principle.“The BSP promotes the judicious use of the resources and ensures that external debt requirements are at manageable levels, to support external debt sustainability,” the central bank said.

—Ronnel W. Domingo