The G-7 leaders have endorsed a new Initiative to enable Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs) to receive deeper, broader and faster debt relief in return for firm commitments to channel the benefits into improving the lives of all their people. The HIPC Initiative was created in 1996 to provide deeper multilateral debt reduction for poor countries with unsustainable debt burdens.

New focus on poverty: The Cologne Initiative calls on the International Financial Institutions to develop a new framework for linking debt relief with poverty reduction that centers around better targeting of budgetary resources for priority social expenditures, for health, child survival, AIDS prevention, education, greater transparency in government budgeting, and much wider consultation with civil society in the development and implementation of economic programs.

Substantially deeper relief: Together with earlier debt relief commitments, the Cologne Initiative provides for reduction of up to 70 percent of the total debts for these countries, (reducing the stock) from about $127 billion today to as low as $37 billion with the cancellation of official development assistance (ODA) debt by G-7 and other bilateral creditors. In today’s dollars (net present value - NPV terms), this would more than triple the amount of relief to be provided from $13 billion under the current HIPC framework to as much as $50 billion. This would be accomplished by reducing the HIPC program target ratios for the NPV of outstanding debt to 150 percent of exports, and 250 percent of government revenues, with fiscal thresholds of 30 percent exports to GDP and 15 percent revenues to GDP, and by providing full cancellation of ODA debts.

Faster relief: Relief will be available significantly faster than under the current framework by providing early cash flow relief ("Interim Relief") and allowing earlier stock reduction.

Broader participation: The number of countries expected to qualify for HIPC relief would rise from 26 to 33, meaning that more than 430 million people could ultimately be affected.

Releasing resources for priority needs: For the average HIPC country, the share of scarce government revenue devoted to debt service could fall by 10 percentage points to a ratio for debt service to revenues of well below 20 percent and close to 10 percent in some cases. This is equivalent to a reduction in actual payments of about 25 percent. Mozambique’s debt will be reduced by some $3.5 billion ($1.7 billion in NPV terms), for example, which could cut in half the share of government revenues allocated to external debt service from over 30 percent to about 15 percent in 1999 and free about $30 million in budgetary resources each year. These savings are equivalent to over half the health budget in 1999 in a country where children are 3 times more likely to die before the age of five than they are to go to secondary school.

In proposing this Initiative on March 16, President Clinton stated that "Our goal is to ensure that no country committed to fundamental reform is left with a debt burden that keeps it from meeting its people's basic human needs and spurring growth. We should provide extraordinary relief for countries making extraordinary efforts to build working economies." On June 16, the President pledged "to work to find the resources so we can do our part and contribute our share toward an expanded trust fund for debt relief."