What the PEFA scores had predicted — and what needs to be done now
By Aboubakr Kaira Barry, Managing Director, Results Associates, Bethesda, Maryland, USA
In 2019-2020, international evaluators handed Senegal a detailed report card on the health of its public finances. This report card was called a PEFA — an assessment of the performance of public expenditure management and financial accountability. The scores were concerning. And almost no one followed up on them.
Four years later, the new Senegalese government discovered around 7 billion dollars of hidden debt. The IMF services then considered that these false declarations were a deliberate choice of economic policy rather than a technical error and reported that the previous administration had masked the country’s true budgetary position. The IMF suspended disbursements under its program of about 1.8 billion dollars with Senegal. In less than a year, S&P downgraded Senegal’s long-term foreign currency credit rating from B+ to CCC+, one of the most brutal sovereign downgrades in recent African history. The Senegalese people — who have no responsibility for this concealment — are now facing painful adjustments. Yet the PEFA assessment had foreseen this crisis.
What PEFA is — and how it works
PEFA was created in 2001 by a coalition of major donors — the World Bank, the IMF, the European Commission, and others — as a common standard for evaluating governments’ public financial management. It is the most widely used diagnostic tool for public financial management in the world. Each assessment rates governments on 31 indicators, according to a five-level scale:
A — excellent (= 4)
B — above average (= 3)
C+ — better than basic level (= 2.25)
C — basic level (= 2)
D+ — minimal elements in place (= 1.25)
D — critical dysfunction (= 1)
These numerical equivalents allow for calculating averages and comparing scores between countries. The regional averages cited in this article are the author’s calculations based on PEFA assessment data for 32 African countries evaluated under the 2016 framework — currently the most comprehensive comparative benchmark available to practitioners.
The ignored report card
The results were not ambiguous. The evaluation of Senegal revealed a dangerous bipolarity. Budget formulation and macroeconomic forecasting showed scores above the regional average — giving the superficial appearance of some competence. But on the indicators that matter most for detecting hidden debt, Senegal scored D and D+ across the board. See the link to the summary here: https://www.pefa.org/assessments/summary/416
Debt management (PI-13) received a D+ rating, which, on the author’s 0-4 scale, represents a negative gap of about 1.25 points compared to an average of 2.51 for the 32 countries — the largest negative gap in all the data compiled for this article. In practice, PEFA findings indicate that there was no functional system in place to record, approve, or track state debt and guarantees from end to end. Off-budget operations (PI-06) scored a D — the lowest possible score — indicating that significant state-owned enterprises operated largely outside the consolidated budget perimeter. Budget risk reporting (PI-10) scored D+, signaling that monitoring of liabilities related to state-owned enterprises and other budget risks was at best fragmented. Financial data integrity (PI-27) scored D, reflecting the very weak mechanisms for detecting discrepancies between reported figures and underlying reality.
On the author’s 0-4 scale, the composite score for these critical indicators was about 1.21, against an already low average of about 1.91 for the 32 countries. The architecture of budget concealment was structurally integrated into Senegal’s public finance system.
A costly history of reforms for limited results
Senegal has not lacked external support. Before 2022, at least 100 million dollars in verified financing, specifically for public financial management at the central administration level, had been mobilized by key partners. This includes around 45 million dollars in technical assistance funded by the IDA through the World Bank’s Public Financial Management Improvement Project (P122476), covering the implementation of the Integrated Public Financial Management System (SIGIF), budget execution reform, debt management systems, and audit capacity building. In addition, 50 million euros from the French Development Agency, approximately 55-56 million dollars at the current exchange rate, explicitly conditioned on the implementation of program budgeting, modernization of domestic revenue, and reform of state asset management.
This is a floor, not a ceiling, as these amounts exclude technical assistance from the IMF through AFRITAC West, budget support from the EU, and contributions from the African Development Bank. Since 2025, the World Bank has approved an additional 215 million dollars to support Senegal’s budget reforms — including a 115 million dollar SEN-FISCALE operation and a parallel results-based program of 100 million dollars focused on debt and public financial management reforms — designed in direct response to the revelations of hidden debt and their macro-budgetary implications.
As described in the World Bank program document, the crisis was “the derivative product of long-standing systemic gaps between de jure procedures… and de facto deficient practices.” Neither money nor frameworks were the constraints. Political will and actual implementation were.
Three steps to break the cycle
First, establish a PEFA Performance Monitoring Unit attached to the Prime Minister’s Office. The immediate priority should be on the five indicators most directly related to hidden debt — PI-06, PI-10, PI-13, PI-15, and PI-27 — with the goal of raising each from a D or D+ level to a minimum of B within three years, alongside full implementation of the GFSM 2014. GFSM 2014 requires consolidated reporting covering all public entities, accrual-based recording of liabilities, and comprehensive debt disclosure — precisely the standards that Senegal has adopted on paper without ever applying them in practice. Each quarterly report should use a traffic light system — green for on-track targets, yellow for at-risk targets, red for targets behind schedule — with a designated responsible person for each indicator, and be reviewed at a quarterly meeting chaired by the Prime Minister. Locating this unit at the Prime Minister’s Office, rather than the Ministry of Finance, creates institutional distance from the evaluated systems and signals that reform responsibility lies at the top of the state.
Second, create an independent budget watchdog modeled after the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). Established in 2010, the OBR provides independent and non-partisan review of government public finance forecasts and budget sustainability. Senegal needs an equivalent body, with a legal mandate to independently verify budget outcomes, assess debt sustainability, and report discrepancies between official figures and consolidated budget reality. Such an institution would have structurally made the occurrence of the hidden debt episode more difficult — not because it would necessarily have uncovered fraud, but because it would have required the government to publicly defend its figures, every year, before an independent authority with real analytical capacity.
Third, adopt the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS). Senegal’s hybrid cash and accrual accounting system leaves the state balance sheet incomplete — land holdings, infrastructure, rights to natural resources, and contingent liabilities can be omitted without violating presentation rules. Full implementation of IPSAS requires comprehensive disclosure of assets and liabilities. Land reserves, urban real estate assets, and a booming hydrocarbon portfolio — none of which currently appear on the balance sheet — represent a true national net wealth that creditors cannot see. A stronger net position, coupled with sustained budget discipline, will improve the country’s credit rating and result in a direct reduction in sovereign borrowing costs — a tangible budget dividend of transparency.
The stakes are too high for another cosmetic reform
Senegal’s hidden debt crisis is not the story of a single corrupt administration. It is the story of a system designed — through inaction — to make transparency optional. PEFA had already told this story in 2019-2020. The Court of Auditors confirmed it in 2024. The 215 million dollars in new World Bank support currently being deployed must not follow the same path as the investments that preceded them.
The PEFA framework, the OBR model, and IPSAS standards are not abstract ideals. They are practical tools used by functional governments that make concealment more difficult and accountability the norm. Senegal has the mandate. It now needs the architecture.
