FREETOWN (AFP) -- Sierra Leone's Finance Minister John Benjamin expressed delight Wednesday at a decision by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) to wipe out most of its foreign debt. "We are delighted," Benjamin told AFP, adding that Monday's decision by the lending institutions under their schemes to help highly indebted nations "will amount to 1.6 billion dollars, which is over 90 percent of the country's debt stock of about 1.7 billion dollars."

The IMF and World Bank had announced that the west African country, which endured 10 years of brutal civil war between 1991 and 2001, was entitled to benefit from the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative as well as the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative plan.

"The estimated annual debt relief that will be available to directly support our budget is going to be about 40 million dollars and will be received as and when the debt service falls through," the finance minister said.

At the end of this year, Sierra Leone will owe international lending institutions 110 million dollars, as opposed to a foreign debt of 1.19 billion dollars at the end of 2005.

Benjamin pledged that the government will "ensure that resources released through debt relief would be applied to programs that provide growth and poverty reduction and eliminate waste and corruption".

Sierra Leone is rich in diamonds, but rendered poor by conflict and sits in 176th place, one from the bottom, on the UN Development Programme's Human Development Index for 2006.