Crown Agents' two-week Advanced CS-DRMS training course successfully concluded on Friday, 16th October 2009. It was attended by a varied mix of countries - Afghanistan, Dominica, Ghana, Kenya and Maldives.
This new course demonstrated how CS-DRMS can be used as a powerful debt management tool for recording and managing a government's complete external and domestic debt portfolio comprising a mix of loans and securities. Additionally, participants were exposed to a unique methodology for capturing Ministries, Departments and Agencies arrears to contractors and suppliers.
The overall objective of the course was to use the system to develop a national borrowing strategy and to show how CS-DRMS can be used as a complementary tool to work alongside the recently released Medium-Term Debt Management Strategy (MTDS) tool from the World Bank. Participants used the Management Tools analytical module to test the impact of various borrowing strategies against target benchmarks including total public debt to GDP and customised ratios such as debt service to tourism receipts and oil revenues.
The course also provided an introduction in applying cost at risk techniques for forecasting debt service payments as well as sessions focusing on interfacing CS-DRMS within an Integrated Financial Management Information System architecture.
Participants benefited from a one day visit to the Commonwealth Secretariat in London where the Secretariat's debt management team presented their advisory services programme and a preview of the CS-DRMS version 1.3 Service Pack which includes electronic links to MTDS and the Quarterly External Debt (QEDS) database and around 20 new debt reports.
QEDS was jointly developed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and brings together detailed external debt data of countries that subscribe to the IMF's Special Data Dissemination Standard (SDDS) and a selected number of countries that participate in the IMF's General Data Dissemination System (GDDS). This initiative facilitates macroeconomic analysis and cross-country data comparison.
Commonwealth Secretariat has this week released the service pack to CS-DRMS user countries.