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The Central Bank of Yemen (CBY) and UNCTAD’s DMFAS Programme just started a new project for the implementation of DMFAS 6.
Yemen has been using the DMFAS software since 1999 to manage its public debt with three main institutions benefitting from UNCTAD technical assistance; the Ministry of Finance (MoF), the Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation (MoPIC) and the CBY which is Yemen’s monetary authority and the Government's fiscal agent.
The CBY in Aden has had no access for some time to the DMFAS installation in Sana’a , resulting in the CBY needing to establish a debt database to ensure timely payment of the country’s external debt and to produce debt statistics. For this purpose, the CBY requested a new technical assistance project from UNCTAD to implement DMFAS 6 in Aden. This project includes the installation of the software, technical training for CBY´s IT staff and functional training for the debt managers of the CBY, MOF and MOPIC.
The first mission in August successfully installed the DMFAS system in the production environment and trained 10 IT personnel. The training covered the installation of DMFAS 6, Security Features, DMFAS 6 Auditing, Database operators procedures, and DMFAS Helpdesk (Trac system).The training also provided an overview of the DMFAS 6 technical architecture, configuration of the Security and Audit modules, and the backup and restore techniques It emphasized the importance of configuring the Security module of the DMFAS system to match the Debt Office team’s setup (users, user groups, data sets and access rights).
The second mission, to deliver functional DMFAS 6 training, was conducted a week later for 13 participants, all new DMFAS users. The second mission benefited from the presence of Ms. Dania El-Osta, an experienced debt management consultant working with USAID on the Economic Recovery & Livelihoods Program (ERLP) in Yemen. Ms. El-Osta had spent several months assisting CBY staff in building the debt data to be entered in DMFAS 6 and said, “Everyone enjoyed the training sessions and they're all excited to start working on DMFAS”.
These missions addressed key challenges such as the need to build a debt database from the beginning and that all participants were new to DMFAS and with different levels of knowledge about debt management. In response to these challenges, the training included theoretical sessions about debt management while focusing on “learn by practice” sessions on the basic functionalities of DMFAS 6. This included practicing with a test database, recording different types of instruments and operations as well as interpreting loan agreements and building amortization tables. Daily hands-on sessions were key in helping the participants to understand and use the software for building the new database.
Another essential component of the training was the elaboration of analytical and managerial user-defined reports with DMFAS 6. Participants learned to work with the different report formats and with the Query Builder to select the instruments included in the reports.
A closing ceremony, presided by Dr. Mohammed Omar Abdullah Ba Naga - Vice-Governor of the CBY, and by Mr. Hussein Alquaiti, Deputy Governor for Foreign Banking operations of CBY, was held on the last day of training. Mr. Alquaiti, who closely followed the training activities, had warm words for both training participants and the trainer. “CBY is proud to have its debt officers able to work with DMFAS 6 and is very satisfied with the results of the mission” he said.
