ARMENIA FORUM TO DISCUSS DEVELOPMENT OF COUNTRY RURAL REGIONS
by Tigran Liloyan
ITAR-TASS News Agency
September 18, 2006 Monday
The Armenia-Diaspora forum that will open in Yerevan on Monday will
discuss issues related to complex development of the country’s rural
areas, especially Armenia’s border settlements. Representatives of
Armenian communities of dozens of countries, heads of the Armenian
Church and all-Armenian organisations have arrived to attend it.
The forum that will be held for the third time "has become a kind of
constitutional structure in relations of the motherland with foreign
compatriots," Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanyan said.
According to the official, "These relations are at a qualitatively
new level corresponding to the changed challenges of the time and
increased country’s potential." This time the forum coincides with
the 15th anniversary of Armenia’s independence.
The Armenian foreign minister said that programmes of foreign donor
countries, international organisations, in particular, the World Bank,
as well as various organisations of the diaspora are also specified in
the guidelines of Armenian rural areas’ development (the US government
will provide to Armenian rural areas 250 million dollars within the
framework of the Millennium Challenge programme).
The Armenian government has chosen 20-25 from the country’s 150
remote settlements that need aid most of all, Oskanyan went on
to say. According to him, the developed programmes that will be
proposed for financing by the diaspora envisage the improvement
of infrastructure, creation of favourable conditions for sustained
development and involvement of the rural population in the process
of the projects’ implementation.
If the Armenian population comprises 3.2 million then over five
million Armenians live outside the republic. Out of this number 2.5
million Armenians live in Russia, about one million – in the United
States and 450,000 – in France.