Viru Harbour community in the Western Province is the first recipient of the United State’s $20m (SBD$160m) Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) – Solomon Islands Threshold Program.
The announcement of Viru Habour community as the first recipient was made by the visiting Alicia Phillips Mandaville who is the Vice President of the Department of Policy and Evaluation at MCC Minister for National Planning and Development Coordination, Rexon Ramofafia today.
The MCC Threshold Program aimsto address the country’s biggest constraints to economic growth: ineffective management of natural resources in the forestry sector and lack of secure access to land which limits tourism investment.
The threshold Program will address these challenges through two projects: the Forest Value Enhancement Project and the Accessing Land for Tourism Investment Facilitation Project.
Viru Harbour community benefits from the Forest Value Enhancement Project.
Mandaville told journalists today that there will be more projects to be rolled out and Viru is just the beginning.
On January 22, 2022, MCC and the Government of Solomon Islands signed the MCC-Solomon Islands Threshold Program Grant Agreement, formalizing a partnership that aims to encourage sustainable development and alleviate poverty.
The $20 million investment will work to yield economic growth in the natural resource management and tourism sectors.
The Forest Value Enhancement Project which Viru Harbour will benefit under seeks to provide communities with economically viable alternatives to logging, which historically has been unsustainable. The project aims to generatemore reliable, sustainable benefits from the country’s natural forest resources by (1) reducingnegative environmental impacts, (2) increasing revenues from forestry production while promoting more equitable revenue disbursement to local communities, and (3) attaining a regulatory and enforcement framework that more evenly balances utilizing forests for both logging and non-logging purposes.