DeniAfrica

GhanaWeb reports on the budgetary gap in the countries development programme, a shortfall that DENI would be able to address:

After taking into account the domestic fiscal efforts with respect to revenue enhancement and expenditure realisation as well as the relief funds from HIPC and Multilateral Debt Initiatives(MDI), a resource gap of $2.04 bn still remains to be financed, Deputy Finance and Economic Planning Minister Anthony Akoto-Osei said…out of the total amount of $12.7 bn projected to finance the second phase of the Growth and Poverty Reduction Strategies, Government intends to raise about $2.7bn from domestic sources while relying on the $4.5 bn pledge from the development partners including the $544m grant from the Millennium Challenge Account.

Vanguard news reports:

In a letter to the Senate President dated May 24, 2006, President Obasanjo said his administration was following up its recent action in paying off the country’s debts to the Paris Club by settling the outstanding debts to the London Club of creditors. Debts owed to the Paris Club are obligations to some foreign creditor nations, while the London Club of creditors is a grouping of institutional and private sector commercial debts. The London Club debts are made up of Promissory Notes, Par Bonds and associated Oil Warrants. President Obasanjo said these categories of debts were traded in the international market.

Inter Press Service News Agency states that:

A new report by the self-auditing arm of the World Bank has painted a grim picture of the results of a decade-long plan by the Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to give the world’s poorest nations debt relief.
The report by the Washington-based Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) says that in half the countries that received debt relief under the programme known as the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative, debt has in fact climbed back up to where it was before the debt relief plan.
So far, the HIPC initiative has eased 19 billion dollars of debt in 18 countries, halving their debt ratios. However, the IEG found that in 11 of the 13 countries the report studies, and which graduated from the programme that qualifies them to start receiving debt forgiveness, called the completion-point, external debt has actually risen.