Municipalities want joint financing from the Brics Bank

Municipalities from countries that are part of Brics – a group formed by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – are working together to create a representative association in the bloc. One of the objectives of the new group is to facilitate obtaining joint financing from the NDB (New Development Bank), the BRICS Bank.

According to the executive director of ABM (Brazilian Association of Municipalities), Eduardo Tadeu Pereira, on June 21, 2024, in the city of Kazan (Russia), a document for the founding of the Brics Association of Municipalities should be made official. A committee of ABM mayors will attend the meeting.

“The idea is that we can exchange experiences of how municipalities solved some problems and be able to seek financing together. In the case of Brics, we think it is important that municipalities have access to the bank, which is a new international financing mechanism”said Tadeu Pereira on Monday (June 17), in the capital of São Paulo, in an interview during the 1st meeting of Urban20 (U20), a group that concentrates G20 cities formed by the world’s main economies and co-chaired by the municipalities of Rio de Janeiro. Janeiro and São Paulo.

Created in December 2014 to expand financing for infrastructure and sustainable development projects in the BRICS and other emerging economies, the NDB, by the beginning of 2023, had around US$32 billion in approved projects. Of this total, around US$4 billion was invested in Brazil, mainly in highway and port projects.

Difficulty in financing

In a speech at the U20, the general coordinator of Brazil at the G20, Felipe Hees, declared that funding for social projects around the world, especially those to combat hunger, is very low: “It is an impressive number. The volume of resources that are allocated to financing is only 2%, which really benefits public policies that aim to attack these problems”.

Hees stated that increasing international financing to combat hunger is one of the pillars of the Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty, a topic that is a priority for the Brazilian presidency of the G20.

“It is no longer a fund of resources that donor countries have to put in. The objective of the Global Alliance is to identify all possible sources of financing that can be mobilized to benefit public policies designed to attack the problem. There are international organizations with their portfolio of varied funds. In this case, one of the ways you can finance public policies is to try to ensure that these portfolios of these international organizations have a certain fixed percentage, guaranteed, of all these resources, 5% to be allocated to social policies”said Brazil’s general coordinator at the G20.

With information from Agência Brasil.