Editorial Desk 
The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) welcomes the successful conclusion of the periodic review of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) safeguards assessment policy by its Executive Board, on December 7, 2022. The review included an independent advisory report by an external panel of experts, which was chaired by Mohammed Nyaoga who is also the CBK Board Chairman.
The external panel of experts examined the effectiveness and appropriateness of the safeguards assessments policy in the five years since the last review in 2015. In Addition to expressing an opinion on the effectiveness and appropriateness of the IMF’s safeguards assessment policy, the panel also made recommendations to The Executive Board to improve and optimize the benefits from the safeguards assessment policy.
The safeguards assessments policy’s main objective is to minimize the possibility of misreporting of information under IMF lending arrangements and misuse of IMF resources. Safeguards assessments seek to provide reasonable assurance to the IMF that central banks of member countries using IMF resources have adequate governance and control frameworks to manage their resources and IMF purchases or disbursements. Safeguards assessments help to measure central
banks’ governance and control frameworks against global best practice and generally emerging trends. These are basically audits on central banks that cover the following key areas of central bank operations: the external audit mechanism the legal structure and autonomy, the financial reporting framework, the internal audit mechanism, and the system of internal controls.Safeguards assessments are conducted on IMF’s members in the context of their IMF-supported programs. In this context, the last safeguards assessment for CBKw as conducted in 2019.
