CBP REGIONAL PARTNER INSTITUTIONS: PÔLE-DETTE

BANQUE DES ETATS DE L'AFRIQUE CENTRALE (BEAC) BANQUE CENTRALE DES ETATS DE L'AFRIQUE DE L'OUEST (BCEAO) POLE REGIONAL DE FORMATION EN GESTION DE LA DETTE EN AFRIQUE DU CENTRE ET DE L'OUEST (POLE-DETTE)

The Regional Debt Management Training Unit for Central Africa and Western Africa (Pôle-Dette) runs the Debt Management Capacity Building Project created by the Training Centres of the Central Bank of Western African States (BCEAO) and the Bank of Central African States (BEAC) and based at the headquarters of the Bank of Central African States in Yaoundé. Established at a round table meeting of funders on 5th October 1999 in Paris, the Pôle-Dette began operations in May 2000.

The project is the culmination of a long process. In 1996, BCEAO and BEAC began training courses in macro-economic management, with financial support from the African Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF) and their own member states. In 1999, other funders joined the debt management training project - notably the funders of the HIPC CBP (particularly Switzerland), the African Capacity Building Foundation, and the European Union.

The Debt Management training project was created in order to provide a solution to the difficulties encountered by several countries in the management of their public finances, and in particular regarding the implementation of consistent and sustainable policies designed to assist them in finding a reliable debt commitment.

Pôle-Dette's activities are principally targeted at Franc Zone Member States that belong to the CBWAS and the BCAS. These countries are Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Guinea Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo. However, Pôle-Dette has also welcomed the participation of representatives from countries that are not members of CAEMC and WAEMU such as Burundi, Comoros, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, Mauritania, Rwanda and Sao Tomé & Principe.

Missions

The Capacity Building Programme implemented by Pôle-Dette since its creation aims principally to help participating countries to develop or optimise their debt management capacities, via namely:

• skill reinforcement in the formulation of a debt strategy, and the processing and management of external and internal debt;
• a better approach to the issue of debt, via a more global, consistent vision that takes into account the constraints of sustainability and multilateral monitoring of economic policies. Within this context, capacity building covers several aspects of debt management such as debt reporting and computerised management, the development and implementation of debt reduction strategies, debt sustainability analysis, legal and institutional aspects of debt management, the interaction between the poverty reduction strategy and the HIPC initiative, best practice in terms of macro-economic forecasting, internal debt management, financial products and markets and public finance sustainability;
• a harmonisation of computerised frameworks with a view to facilitating data exchange and cooperation between national public debt management agencies;
• the production of more reliable debt statistics that also allow better readability of the public debt level as well as the development of reliable strategies and;
• the establishment of a critical mass of regional specialists with a view to markedly reducing the weight of foreign assistance.

Objectives

The actions taken to date in the framework of the CBP have had three main objectives:

1. To help the countries which are potentially eligible for the HIPC Initiative to undertake an independent analysis of the sustainability of their debt at and after the decision point of the Initiative: this has occurred principally through national workshops on public debt sustainability analysis, followed where necessary by follow-up missions to cement country capacity. In each workshop and mission, countries produced or updated their national debt strategies, analysing their debt sustainability and putting them in a position to negotiate better their entitlement to debt relief with the Bretton Woods Institutions. As a result of these workshops and missions, it is considered that 5 countries in the region are now in a position to conduct their own debt strategy analyses on a regular basis, and 4 could undertake training of their own nationals.

2. To help countries who are in the interim period of the HIPC Initiative to better negotiate their debt relief with different categories of creditors, and to forecast the impact of the relief on poverty reduction. To achieve this, the debt managers of the countries who have reached their decision points have taken part in more detailed subject-specific regional workshops of two types. First, workshops on debt renegotiation have allowed them to build renegotiation skills, write national renegotiation strategy reports, and identify options for new borrowing policies. They have also created a network of regional debt managers who can contact each other at any time to find out the latest progress in negotiations with any individual creditor. Second, emphasis is placed on deepening capacities to forecast the results of macro-economic policy and poverty reduction strategies, so as to allow officials to identify the potential impact of debt relief on poverty reduction.

3. To prepare HIPC countries to maintain debt sustainability beyond HIPC. There have been three aspects of joint work here. Projects have surpassed external debt to analyse domestic and total (external + domestic) debt sustainability, at both national and regional levels. New financing, both domestic and external have also been analysed. Thirdly, in cooperation with all the other partners of the Pôle-Dette, increasing attention has been paid to institutional questions relating to public debt management, because institutional deficiencies are one of the main origins of the unsustainable financial and debt management policies pursued in francophone Africa over the last three decades.

Activities

In accordance with the objectives assigned to the Project, Pôle-Dette's activities are implemented via:

• ad hoc technical assistance to participating countries in updating their debt databases, preparation of their debt renegotiation files with their London and Paris Club creditors as well as in strengthening the legal and institutional framework of the management of their debt;

• the organisation of regional seminars covering various themes relative to debt management. These seminars are intended for the following target persons: deciders, debt managers, computing specialists, debt database managers, macro-economists and specialists in poverty reduction issues;

• the organisation of national workshops on debt sustainability analysis, both within the framework of the HIPC initiative and on behalf of those countries not eligible for this initiative;

• the production of studies and research works on debt management, public finance sustainability and poverty reduction;

• the creation of a training programme for trainers.

Although Pôle-Dette has developed a partnership with several international institutions (World Bank, Comsec, UNCTAD, IMF and UNITAR), Debt Relief International has been its main partner in French-speaking West Africa. Both institutions co-financed 26 seminars and workshops out of the 38 that Pôle-Dette organised between May 2000 and September 2004. In tandem with these training activities, Pôle-Dette and DRI led missions in several countries in order to assess capacity building needs and respond to urgent requests for strategy implementation and formulation, as well as to support the improvement processes of debt management institutional frameworks, namely in Benin, Cameroon, the Central African Republic Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Equitorial Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal and Togo.

Specifically, since its creation, Pôle-Dette has carried out the following activities in conjunction with DRI:

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

For more details on joint HIPC CBP events, see the Calendar of Events page on this site.

For more details on the Pôle-Dette, please email Georges Diffo Nigtiopop on diffo@beac.int