After last month’s devastating earthquakes, Türkiye will need more than €100 billion to rebuild, according to Ankara’s estimations on the potential costs but the European Union (EU) and member country Sweden hosted a conference on Monday to drum up support.
The donors at the European Union-led conference on Monday, which included some 400 international actors – countries, regional organizations, and NGOs- pledged a total of €7 billion ($7.5 billion) to help the reconstruction projects after the worst natural disaster on February 6 killed more than 56,000 people in Türkiye and neighboring Syria.
Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said that the money would give at least a gleam of hope to people that rebuilding dignity and everyday life will be possible and will help Turkish citizens whose lives were destroyed in a matter of seconds.
The pledged amount includes €1 billion pledged by the EU’s executive European Commission (EC), half of which will be spent via the European Investment Bank (EIB) – the bloc’s lending arm – by suspending its nearly total ban on financing for Türkiye in recent years.
Although the EU does not have diplomatic ties with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad due to the war that started there in 2011, EC would spend a further €108 million on humanitarian assistance and early recovery in Syria.
Considering the lack of political dialogue between Assad and his adversaries and the bloc’s sanctions on Damascus, the EU said it would only finance humanitarian assistance and early recovery but not full-scale reconstruction.
According to Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, Berlin will also double its aid for those affected in Turkey and Syria to €240 million.
Addressing the Brussels conference via video link, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pointed out that Türkiye would build 319,000 homes in the first year, putting the cost of the earthquake at $104 billion.
The initial estimates show that some 650,000 homes in Türkiye would need to be rebuilt.
Noting that it’s impossible for a single nation to tackle a crisis of this scale on its own, Erdoğan underscored that Türkiye will never forget the solidarity shown by its friend and allies in these difficult days.
According to the estimates made by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the total financial burden of the earthquake disaster for Türkiye amounted to 9% of the country’s GDP forecast for 2023, at around $103.6 billion.
The estimated recovery costs for Syria, where nine in 10 people live below the poverty line, are around $14.8 billion, the UNDP says.
