EWMI has entered into a three-year cooperative agreement with the United States Agency for International Development (“USAID”) to fulfill the regional component of the Partners for Financial Stability (“PFS”) program. The PFS program is one of the first significant post-presence activities in USAID graduated countries in Central and Eastern Europe (“CEE”). These countries are the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. The purpose of the program is to fill the gaps in the institutional development of the financial sectors of the graduated CEE countries through regional integration and the practical application of lessons learned in neighboring countries.
EWMI jointly funds this program with USAID on a 50-50 cost sharing basis and seeks to leverage the funds available for PFS activities with parallel and co-financing arrangements with other donors, governments in the region, and matching contributions from sub-grantees. PFS is a partnership program and therefore not like other past or current technical USAID-funded assistance programs. Partners will be expected to partially bear the cost of PFS activities.
The PFS program recognizes the importance of having a means to provide ongoing limited and discrete assistance in the financial sector (covering banking, bank supervision, pension, insurance, and capital market issues, such as disclosure, accounting, and corporate governance) in the CEE countries. This assistance also supports intra-regional initiatives among the CEE countries to address shared financial sector issues. An additional objective of the PFS program is to facilitate the sharing of the experiences of the CEE countries in the area of financial sector development with the South-Eastern European (“SEE”) countries (Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and the former Yugoslavian countries). Such “East-to-East” technical assistance will provide CEE experts on a short-term advisory basis to the SEE countries to enable them to benefit from the CEE experience in financial sector reform.
