The International Monetary Fund and Senegal have reached a staff-level agreement on a three-year, US$2.2 billion loan package that will require the West African country to restructure its sovereign debt, Hiru News reported on Tuesday, carrying a Reuters report.
The agreement is conditional on Senegal seeking debt treatment “to restore debt sustainability”, the IMF said. In a separate statement, Senegal’s ministry of economy and finance said it had agreed to restructure under an “enhanced common framework” that would give “a tailored response to the specific characteristics of Senegal’s debt composition”.
A hidden-debt case
Senegal’s public debt reached 132 per cent of gross domestic product at the end of 2024 on IMF figures, after the government discovered that the previous administration had misreported billions of dollars of borrowing.
The IMF puts the concealed debt at more than US$11 billion on end-2023 numbers. Some analysts estimate closer to US$13 billion — more than a quarter of Senegal’s roughly US$40 billion economy.
The Fund froze an existing US$1.8 billion programme after the discovery, and the two sides spent months in what Reuters described as contentious, drawn-out talks over a replacement. Tuesday’s deal requires Senegal to take “decisive corrective actions” in support of its request for a waiver over the misreporting, and is still subject to approval by IMF management and the Executive Board.
The contrast with Colombo
The mechanism matters. Senegal is heading into the G20 Common Framework, the multilateral process created in 2020 to coordinate official bilateral creditors for low-income countries.
Sri Lanka did not use it. Its restructuring was conducted outside the G20 Common Framework, through an ad hoc Official Creditor Committee alongside a separate track for commercial claims — a route the Global Sovereign Debt Roundtable report in April placed alongside Ghana, Zambia, Ethiopia and Suriname as advanced-stage workouts.
The two cases also differ in origin. Sri Lanka’s default followed a foreign exchange crisis on debt that was, for the most part, disclosed. Senegal’s follows an accounting failure, which is why its programme is tied to a misreporting waiver and to corrective action on debt-management capacity rather than to a balance-of-payments trigger alone.
Sri Lanka’s own stock stood at US$97.95 billion at end-June, with International Sovereign Bonds still carrying more than US$10 billion of the total after the 2024 exchange.
Not reported
The Reuters copy did not give the facility type, the size of the first disbursement, the expected timetable for board approval, or which bilateral creditors hold the bulk of Senegal’s official debt. No other verified Sri Lankan newsroom appears to have carried the story, and the IMF’s own press release was not accessible at the time of writing.
