A weeklong regional course on liquidity forecasting for physical and monetary management for 35 participants from WAIFEM member countries' Central Banks yesterday kicked-off at the Jerma Beach Hotel in Kololi.
Organised by the West African Institute for Economic and Financial Management (WAIFEM), the course among others, seeks to upgrade the knowledge and analytical skills of participants in the area of liquidity forecasting, a vital element in liquidity management.
The course will cover the following broad thematic areas: Monetary Policy and Liquidity Management in Central Banks, Modeling Techniques, Fiscal Cash Planning and Management, Country Case Studies (The Gambia, Ghana, Nigeria and Sierra Leone), Forecasting Government Cash Flows, and Forecasting Foreign Exchange Flows and Inter-bank Market Liquidity.
Speaking at the opening ceremony, Professor Akpan H. Ekpo, the Director General of WAIFEM, said efficient liquidation management in the context of monetary policy implementation is the sine qua non for contemporary fiscal and monetary policy decision-making.
According to him, it involves the management of the Central Bank's balance sheet through monetary operations, so as to steer monetary and liquidation conditions towards the attainment of the target for inflation.
"This is important, because the higher the volatility in monetary and liquidity conditions, the higher the costs of liquidity management, and hence the attainment of monetary policy objectives will be," he stated.
WAIFEM boss noted that since its operations over the years, WAIFEM has organised over 330 training and capacity building programmes in the form of national and regional courses, among others.
"To ensure high standards in its programmes, WAIFEM collaborates with a number of reputable institutions, notably the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, African Development Bank, the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, the Commonwealth Secretariat, African Capacity Building Foundation and Bank of England, among others," he said.
These collaborative technical partners, he noted, find in WAIFEM an effective and efficient platform to reach many more in the sub-region, while the institute finds in them a source of cutting edge knowledge and skills to enrich its programmes.
In his opening remarks, Mr. Momodou Bamba Saho, the Governor of the Central Bank of The Gambia commended the management of WAIFEM for sustaining the capacity-building programmes and for bringing this important course to The Gambia to enhance the capacity of middle/senior/executive level officials from the national agencies responsible for monetary and fiscal policies in WAIFEM member countries.
An efficient and effective framework for management of liquidity, Governor Saho added, is at the very heart of the conduct of monetary policy.
According to the Central Bank Governor, the impact of the recent global financial crisis has also demonstrated the importance of liquidity management.
"The impact of the crisis showed that even though liquidity management appears to be simple, yet the complex nature of interrelationships among different markets in the financial system and the uncertainty in the behaviour of financial markets makes the exercise rather complex," he stated.