Turkey Paid Off Somalia's Overdue IMF Arrears in 2020, Not All Its Debt

Turkey’s Official Gazette announced on November 6, 2020, that the government had paid roughly 2.4 million IMF Special Drawing Rights, an amount worth a few million dollars, to cover Somalia’s overdue arrears to the International Monetary Fund. Somali officials publicly thanked Ankara for the gesture, and it circulated widely online as evidence that Turkey had erased Somalia’s IMF debt outright. The actual scope of the payment was narrower: it cleared Somalia’s arrears, the specific unpaid balance that had been accumulating interest, rather than the country’s full debt load to the Fund.

That fuller debt load was being addressed through a separate, much larger process. The IMF and World Bank had approved Somalia’s eligibility for debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative in March 2020, a multilateral framework built to bring down unsustainable debt in the world’s poorest countries. Under that program, Somalia’s total external debt, put at $5.2 billion at the end of 2018, was set to fall to roughly $3.7 billion in net present value terms once the relief process worked through, a reduction driven by dozens of creditor governments and institutions acting together, not by any single country’s contribution.

Turkey’s payment fit into that broader effort as one piece among many. It was channeled through an IMF administered account built specifically to collect contributions from more than 100 member countries and use them to clear arrears for countries working through the HIPC process. Turkey’s relationship with Somalia had deepened steadily since 2011, when Ankara sent aid during that year’s famine and went on to build hospitals, roads and a military training base in Mogadishu, making the 2020 debt payment one more entry in a long list of Turkish assistance to the country rather than an isolated gesture.

Somalia’s debt relief process reached its formal conclusion three years later. The IMF and World Bank’s International Development Association approved Somalia’s HIPC Completion Point on December 13, 2023, the milestone at which the bulk of a country’s qualifying debt is actually forgiven, delivering about $4.5 billion in debt service savings. Somalia’s external debt burden fell from about 64 percent of GDP in 2018 to under 6 percent by the end of 2023, a reduction that took the coordinated work of the full creditor group, Turkey’s arrears payment among them, rather than any one nation clearing Somalia’s books on its own.