March 18 (SeeNews) - The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is launching a Green Economy Financing Facility (GEFF) that will provide loans for energy efficiency improvements to households in Montenegro, it said on Thursday.
Crnogorska Komercijalna Banka (CKB), member of OTP Group, has signed up as the first partner financial institution in the country with a credit line of 2 million euro for on-lending to homeowners, the EBRD said in a statement.
The financing is part of a larger 135 million euro ($161 million) GEFF programme for the Western Balkans and will help to make households more energy efficient, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve living standards, the EBRD said.
"We are pleased that Montenegro has joined the GEFF family and that Montenegrin citizens will now have access to well-structured finance and incentive grants for investments that will contribute to improving the energy efficiency of their homes," EBRD Head of Montenegro Jaap Sprey noted.
The programme will benefit from over 27 million euro in incentives to end borrowers provided by the Western Balkans Investment Framework. Technical assistance to support the preparation, implementation and monitoring of the programme is supported by grants by the government of Austria with over 5 million euro and additional nearly 2 million euro by bilateral donors to the WBIF.
To date, around 7,000 households in the Western Balkans have improved their energy efficiency thanks to GEFF with investments in projects that contributed to a reduction of over 10,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per year, equivalent to removing 6,000 cars from the street.
($ = 0.838816 euro)
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