Out of the financing trap? Financing post-conflict countries and LICUSs

Post-conflict and fragile countries are emerging as a specific group. This group of countries is highly heterogeneous and their situation particularly difficult to address. Some of them are failing to attract new financing, which usually requires a specific donor taking the lead (see UK for Sierra Leone or France for CAR). Other countries, having endowments in natural resources or a strategic interest, find it easy to borrow from private sources by providing their future commodities sales as collateral, which goes against international recommendations. Despite this heterogeneity, these countries often face a common set of problems, which justify an early, specific and harmonized answer of the donors community. Among these issues, the international community has to deal specifically with the general difficulty of financing Low Income Countries Under Stress (LICUSs), especially when the country involved is in arrears to international financial institutions. The purpose of the present non paper is to suggest some ways forwards on this specific issue.