MEFMI Conducts Training on the Private Capital Monitoring System for Balance of Payments Staff of Bank of Botswana

MEFMI conducted an in-country workshop for Bank of Botswana (BOB), on the Private Capital Monitoring System (PCMS) from 14 -18 November 2016. The workshop was attended by five (5) officials from the Balance of Payments Section in the Research Department. In terms of gender participation, there were four (4) females and one (1) male, translating into 80% and 20% female and male representation, respectively.

The key objective of the workshop was to facilitate hands-on training on the functionalities of the MEFMI PCMS Version 3 to the team. The PCMS is a web-based software developed by MEFMI to enable Member States capture and analyse data on Foreign Private Capital (FPC) flows and stocks. The PCMS Version 3 is the newest upgrade of the system, which has been enhanced to enable shorter time for data entry and to produce reports that are fully compliant with Balance of Payments and International Investment Position (BPM6) reporting methodology.

The team of resource persons included Ms Vivian Namugambe, MEFMI Programme Manager; Mr. Dennis Mollel from Tanzania (PCMS Developer) and Mr. Philip Mboya, Senior Economist at Bank of Tanzania and MEFMI Graduate Fellow in FPC Monitoring and Analysis. On the first day of the workshop, the team met with the Director of Research and Financial Stability Department, Dr. Kealeboga S. Masalila, to discuss the objectives and expected deliverables from the activity.

The workshop delivered the following key outputs:
• Enriched participants’ knowledge on FPC concepts and use of financial statements for validation;
• Imparted skills on the functionalities of the PCMS Version 3. This was done through hands-on sessions of dummy data entry, generation of reports; and consistency checks to validate the output; and
• Revised the Bank of Botswana FPC Survey questionnaire to ease data collection process and enable consistency with the PCMS Version 3.

The workshop was concluded with a final test run on the system by the BOB team and the subsequent signing of a User Acceptance Test confirming the integrity of the system for use in the processing of data for their next FPC survey.

Botswana becomes the second MEFMI Member State to receive training on the PCMS Version3, after Rwanda. MEFMI plans to carry out training for more Member States in 2017 to facilitate their migration to this upgraded system version.