Jamaica is the latest country to get IMF board approval for loans under the Resilience and Sustainability Trust (RST), following the acceptance of Costa Rica, Barbados, Rwanda and Bangladesh in the last six months.
The multi-million-dollar finance packages vary for each country, from $183 million for Barbados to $1.4 billion for Bangladesh, and recipients have different ideas of how they will spend the money.
The RST fund, set up last year, was aimed at redistributing affordable finance from rich to poorer countries, along with policy support to manage macro-economic climate risks.
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The IMF believes it can also catalyse essential private sector financing to boost climate action and to decarbonise financial markets.
Experts hailed the move as “pivotal” in helping vulnerable nations address the triple crises of debt, Covid and climate change, and said it could fill a gap in climate finance architecture.
Commenting on Jamaica’s $764 million agreement, Bo Li, deputy managing director and acting chair of the IMF board, said the funding would create incentives to “switch to renewables, reduce energy consumption, develop green financial instruments, and require proper management of climate risks in the financial sector”
