Heavily Indebted Poor Countries

The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative aims at assisting the world's poorest countries by bringing their external debt to sustainable levels, conditional on their governments showing satisfactory performance levels. The program was first proposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in 1996 and underwent review and reform in 1999. Debt relief is conditional upon efforts to reduce poverty in the participating countries.

To date, the highly indebted poor countries that the HIPC initiative aims at assisting are:

• Benin
• Bolivia
• Burkina Faso
• Cameroon
• Chad
• Ethiopia
• The Gambia
• Guinea
• Guinea-Bissau
• Guyana
• Honduras
• Madagascar
• Malawi
• Mali
• Mauritania
• Mozambique
• Nicaragua
• Niger
• Rwanda
• São Tomé and Príncipe
• Senegal
• Tanzania
• Uganda
• Zambia

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