An agreement on provision of a loan of USD 560 million by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, part of the World Bank Group) for financing development of Ukraine’s road network entered into effect on 11 February. The press service of the State Automobile Road Agency (Ukravtodor) announced this in a statement.
"The Ukrainian side has fully complied with all the conditions necessary to obtain the loan for development of the country’s road network, therefore, the agreement has entered into force a week earlier than we expected and planned," the press service quoted Lilia Horbatiuk, the head of Ukravtodor’s department of international cooperation and investment, as saying.
The state agency can begin procuring the works and services required for implementation of the third joint project with the IBRD for development of the road sector in March.
As reported, the money will be used to continue the reconstruction of the Highway M03 (Kyiv-Kharkiv-Dovzhansky). In particular, reconstruction work will be performed on the Poltava-Kharkiv section of the highway. In addition, as part of this project, design and repair of the second East-West transport corridor, namely Krakovets-Lviv-Ternopil-Vinnytsia-Uman-Kirovohrad, will begin with subsequent repair of the Kirovohrad-Mykolaiv-Kherson corridor to the southern ports of Ukraine.
The World Bank has already financed two projects involving repair and reconstruction of various sections of the M03 Highway. The first is the project for repair of the Boryspil-Lubny section of the M03 Highway with a length of approximately 120 kilometers. The funds that were saved were also used to finance repairs on some sections between Lubny and Poltava. In addition, World Bank funds were used to finance elimination of places of high concentration of road accidents and two pedestrian bridges on the Kyiv-Odesa highway.
The second project involved repair of a section between Lubny and Poltava with a length of about 108 kilometers. Work to improve the infrastructure in areas of concentration of traffic accidents was also performed and money was spent on building institutional capacity.
