Regional Activities
• Short term training through courses, seminars and workshops.
• Senior policy seminars and retreats in selected topical themes in debt management.
• Regional studies on issues or problems that transcend many or all member states, including identification of capacity gaps, development of common solutions and relevant methodologies and instruments.
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Areas of Focus
The Debt Management Programme focuses on:
• Building sustainable institutional and professional capacity in client institutions.
• Fostering adoption of best practice in all spheres of total debt management.
• Raising awareness among senior and executive level officials on key emerging challenges and opportunities in debt management. This is accomplished through addressing identified priority capacity needs and providing training and support in the following professionally segregated functional areas of debt management offices (DMOs):
1.1 Front Office:
• Loan negotiations and debt reorganization, including the relevant legal aspects.
• Maintaining and coordinating donor financing programmes, including gathering information on creditor policies, practices and precedents that is required for effective negotiations.
• Gathering information, and monitoring domestic and international financial lending terms and conditions.
• Planning and managing domestic debt issuance programmes, including determining the appropriate timing and type of instruments to issue.
1.2 Middle Office:
• Sensitivity analysis of new loan proposals or offers, to determine the optimal sources of government borrowing.
• Review of existing debt portfolios, for publication or dissemination to stakeholders and the general public.
• Debt sustainability analysis (DSA), and where necessary determination of required debt relief to restore debt sustainability and appropriate levels of new financing and debt strategies.
• Domestic debt sustainability analysis (DDSA), to determine fiscal sustainability and macro-economically sustainable levels of domestic debt and required fiscal correction.
• Cost-and-risk analysis, in the context of risk modelling and formulation of country medium term debt strategies (MTDSs).
• Integrating debt information and analysis into wider government budgeting, macroeconomic and cash management and forecasting.
1.3 Back Office:
• Manual record keeping and security, through registers or filing systems on a loan-by-loan basis, covering details of individual loan agreements or amendments, disbursements or realization of proceeds from loan issues, debt service transactions, as well as other supporting information, such as interest rates and exchanges applicable to loan transactions.
• Tracking and projecting loan disbursements and future debt flows for purposes of meeting debt servicing needs, balance of payments and government cash management and forecasting.
• Monitoring loan maturities and performing the debt servicing processes in an accurate and timely manner.
• Recording, validation/auditing and maintenance of up-to-date and secure debt databases, through effective use of computer-based debt management systems (CBDMS), notably the COMSEC’s CS-DRMS and UNCTAD’s DMFAS, and other government financial systems such as integrated financial management information systems (IFMIS) and Book Entry Systems or Auction Systems of central banks.
• Generation of debt reports and statistics that are customized to the requirements of the various domestic and international users, including for debt portfolio reviews and for electronic reporting to the World Bank Debtor Reporting System (DRS) and also to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) through their country missions, Statistics Department and the Data Dissemination Standards