YEREVAN, DECEMBER 21, NOYAN TAPAN. The Armenian Development Agency (ADA) has reached a principal agrrement with the World Bank (WB) on receiving technical assistance in the form of granst in the next 4 years. The director general of ADA Tigran Davtian stated this at the December 21 press conference dedicated to his 100 days in office. In his words, the Dutch government has agreed to provide annual technical assistance of 500 thousand USD to ADA through WB. The Dutch government and WB have alerady signed the respective agreement. After the approval of the implementation procedures of the indicated technical assiastance program by WB - in early 2008, the respective agreement will be signed between the WB and the Armenian government. Under this program, ADA will receive assistance for promotion of exports, attraction of investments, and organization of business forums and market studies. "In case of availability of this resource, our capacities will almost double as in 2007 we worked only with the state budget's financing which was quite limited," the director general of ADA said. To recap, in 2003-2005, the program on exports promotion and investment attraction was implemented with WB credit resources of 1 million USD. According to T. Davtian, over the last few months, with the aim of receiving assistance, ADA was conducting intense negotiaions with other "trade-economic and financial-economic international organizations operating in Armenia, and preliminary principal agreements were reached or some documents were signed with almost all of them". In particular, an agreement on development of Armenian marzes has been reached with the UNDP, another agreement - with the USAID on receiving technical assistance for implementation of the programs to be included in the IT Sector Development Concept which is currently being developed.

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