Development Finance International
28 April – DFI Co-Sponsor Meeting Launching Call to Action on SDG10
At the IMF and World Bank Spring Meetings in Washington, Winnie Byanyima of UNAIDS and Matthew Martin of DFI co-chaired a meeting to launch a Call to Action on SDG10. This Call will demand a reform of the way the international system monitors inequality, to make it track genuine inequality across all levels of income and wealth, rather than “shared prosperity” between the middle class and the poor. The meeting assembled academic, civil society, church and UN experts, and agreed on a plan of action for 2023-24 to change the monitoring indicators used by the UN in SDG10 (Reducing Inequality) and by the World Bank in its corporate goals and scorecard. The next steps will be to organise an event among UN member states at the UN High Level Political Forum on the SDGs in New York in July 2023.
OMAN: Commonwealth Meridian – March 2022 to February 2023
DFI was chosen by the Omani government through competitive bidding to deploy Meridian at Oman’s Debt Management Office. The project included computerising external and domestic direct government and government-guaranteed debt. The debt databases were implemented from scratch using Excel data entry sheets and manual entry or automatic upload into Meridian. DFI and the Commonwealth Secretariat also worked together to enhance Meridian’s treatment of Islamic loan products. In three workshops, DMO staff were trained on interpreting loan and credit agreements, and intermediate and advanced use of Meridian. DMO is now seeking to expand use of Meridian in Oman by linking to its Integrated Financial Management Information System.
14 October - Washington DC – A Nordic Initiative to Resolve the New Debt Crisis
DFI and Norwegian Church Aid launched a new report on how to solve the new debt crisis, at the IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings. The report shows that the crisis is widespread, affecting 114 countries, and concentrated in those countries accessing capital markets (not in former HIPCs). Debt service is far higher than spending on education, health, social protection and climate. Debt to domestic and multilateral creditors are key components in many countries, and will need to be restructured. The report analyses in detail the lessons of past debt relief initiatives, and makes 10 sets of recommendations to ensure that debt relief is: provided to all types of countries, based on their SDG financing needs, negotiated rapidly, including all necessary creditors, and providing protection against lawsuits. In addition, it recommends measures to avoid future crises by maximising accountability to domestic stakeholders; protecting against future predatory and corrupt debts; building country negotiating capacity; and providing lower-cost development financing.
11 October Washington DC – CRI 2022 – Failing to Fight Exploding Inequality
DRI and Oxfam launched the 2022 Commitment to Reducing Inequality (CRI) report, the first detailed analysis of 161 governments’ actions to fight inequality during COVID-19. COVID has increased inequality worldwide, with the poorest hit hardest by the disease and its economic impacts. CRI 2022 shows clearly that most of the world’s governments failed to mitigate this dangerous rise in inequality. Half of lower-income countries saw health spending fall as a % of their budgets, half of countries cut the % of social protection spending, three quarters cut the % of education spending. In addition, two-thirds failed to increase minimum wages in line with GDP, and 95% failed to increase taxes on the richest people and corporations. Only a small group of governments bucked this trend, taking clear actions to combat inequality, putting the rest of the world to shame. For the English report and database, see here. For other language versions of the report, here.
SOMALIA: Commonwealth Meridian – December 2020 to September 2022
This project, funded by the African Development Bank, was the first to be implemented by DFI as exclusive distributor for Meridian. Its main objectives were to install Meridian, migrate the debt database from CS-DRMS and train Somali debt managers to record, manage and report on their debt portfolio. The new database was drawn from CS-DRMS records and loan balances reconciled with creditors for the 2020 Paris Club exercise. Following two training courses held in Nairobi, DMU staff are using Meridian on the Ministry of Finance’s cloud space, to administer their portfolio and regularly produce a quarterly debt bulletin – one of the pre-conditions for HIPC Completion Point which Somalia reached in December 2023, with total debt savings of $4.5 billion.
