Jordan has incurred direct and indirect costs of approximately $6.6 billion since the beginning of the Syrian crisis in March 2011, Jordan’s Minister of Planning and International Cooperation, Imad Fakhoury, revealed yesterday.
Speaking during a meeting with Finland’s Minister for Foreign Trade and Development, Lenita Toivakka, Fakhoury pointed out that hosting and providing basic services to such a large number of refugees increased the kingdom’s budget deficit and public debt.
He stressed that the Syrian refugee crisis’s costs “will multiply in the future if the international community does not meet its obligations”.
“Today we can see European countries struggling to deal with waves of asylum seekers although in one or two days Jordan receives the total number who’ve arrived in some European countries,” he added.
Meanwhile, the Finnish minister stressed on the need to provide more support to Jordan to help it bear the burdens of the Syrian crisis, adding that her government “will work to increase development assistance to Jordan to enable it to preserve its development gains and to continue to provide services to the Syrian refugees”.
Nearly 1.5 million Syrians live in Jordan, 750,000 of them entered the kingdom prior to the Syrian conflict.
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