By Enyichukwu Enemanna
The cash-strapped Pakistan on Monday announced that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) board has approved the seventh and eighth reviews of its bailout program which will release $1.17 billion in funds to the troubled country.
The Finance Minister Miftah Ismail who revealed this, also said the IMF had agreed to extend the programme by a year and augment the funds by $1 billion.
He said that government efforts to get the programme back on track via painful corrective economic measures had saved Pakistan from default.
The South Asian country is currently suffering from devastating floods which has at least killed over a thousand persons with millions displaced.
This is in addition to its nosediving foreign exchange reserves which at the moment stands at a levels that cover only a month of exports, a country whose economy has wrangled with a massive current account deficit and high inflation. This fund is expected to serve as a lifeline.
“The IMF Board has approved the revival of our EFF program. We should now be getting the 7th & 8th tranche of $1.17 billion,” Ismail said on Twitter.
The IMF’s resident representative in Islamabad did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Pakistan’s 36-month, $6 billion Extended Fund Facility programme, which it entered in 2019, has been stalled since earlier this year as it struggled to meet targets set by the lender.
The board was scheduled to take up Pakistan’s reviews in a meeting on Monday.
The go-ahead from the IMF board will open other multilateral and bilateral avenues of funding for Pakistan, which were awaiting a clean bill of health from the lender.
