Local gov’ts discover France’s waste plants

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

The French Agency for Development offers loans to the state, banks and municipalities in Turkey as development aid and untied aid. Company photo

The French Agency for Development (AFD) has organized a study trip about integrated solid waste management in France for a delegation composed of Turkey’s local authorities’ representatives, as part of a partnership with Denizbank.

The AFD offers loans to the state, banks and municipalities in Turkey as development aid and untied aid, said Ziya Murat Ülker, the project officer at the AFD Local authorities and urban development department, in a telephone interview with Hürriyet Daily News.

The agency reaches municipalities via banks that play a “financial intermediation” role, he said. As the agency can also work via banks such as Denizbank to finance municipalities, it finances their projects with the loan granted to the bank, then these loans are given to the municipalities for their projects, he said.

Ülker stated that the agency also cares about consciousness-raising works in the projects about the municipalities, along with financing. “We created a fund worth 80 million euros in the framework of a partnership with Denizbank for the works such as consciousness-raising and capacity enhancement,” Ülker said. The AFD organized this trip in the Provence Alpes Côte d’Azur Region on June 24 and 25, together with the training centre in Marseille Centre for Financial, Economics, Banking Studies. The AFD invited the representatives of the local authorities with the aim of “discovering” the institutional and the technological organization methods of this sector in this French region, he said, noting that they aimed to encourage the municipalities in Turkey and in France to develop dialog and technical cooperation with each other.

As the mayors and department chiefs of several Turkish municipalities, mostly small and medium sized not metropolitan municipalities, were invited, representatives of the Union of Turkish Municipalities and the Union of Municipalities of the Marmara Region were also present at the study-trip, he added.
 
The AFD is a public development finance institution that is working to fight poverty and foster growth in developing countries.