MEFMI Conducts Workshop on User Needs for the Private Capital Monitoring System

MEFMI conducted a regional user needs workshop on the Private Capital Monitoring System (PCMS) from 26 to 28 November 2018 in Harare, Zimbabwe. The workshop was attended by 14 officials from 12 member countries of the MEFMI region. In terms of gender participation, there were nine (9) males and five (5) females, translating into 64% and 36% male and female respectively. The workshop was officially opened by Sehliselo Mpofu, the MEFMI Director for the Macroeconomic Management Programme.

PCMS is a web-based application that was developed by MEFMI in 2008 to assist member countries to effectively monitor private capital flows into their economies. Presently, the PCMS is used by seven (7) MEFMI member countries, namely Botswana, Eswatini, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Rwanda and Tanzania.

MEFMI plans to revamp the system in a bid to improve its functionalities in order to meet the dynamic needs of its users. It is against this background that MEFMI conducted a workshop for users, to kick-start the revamp process.

The main objectives of the workshop were two-fold. First, to provide a platform to evaluate the system’s compliance with country reporting requirements in its current version. Second, the workshop was intended to provide a platform to gather and consolidate additional user needs.

The team of resource persons that facilitated the workshop included Vivian Namugambe, MEFMI Programme Manager; Dennis Mollel, System Developer from Tanzania (PCMS Developer) and Tendo Lubwama, System Developer from Bank of Uganda.

As a key output, the workshop delivered a comprehensive list of needs and requirements expected by users from the enhanced system. MEFMI will hence use the users’ inputs gathered from this workshop to form basis for the planned upgrades on the software. The revamped system is expected to facilitate more efficient reporting of private capital flows data in line with Balance of Payments and International Investment Position (BPM6) reporting requirements.

“The anticipated upgrades on the PCMS are expected to deliver a very robust system which will not only improve the quality and availability of private capital flows data, but will also be leveraged on to enable reporting of other statistics like trade in services and private sector external debt. In an environment of increasing external vulnerabilities, the availability of up-to-date, high quality and reliable BOP and IIP statistics is critical for the region” Sehliselo Mpofu  Director Macroeconomic Management Programme said.