of the Branch. When UNCTAD started to support countries attending debt rescheduling negotiations in 1979, data were needed to make calculations. The first difficulty the Trade and Projections Branch staffs encountered was the lack of information on external debt of debtor countries: they did not know how much they owed, to what countries and what creditors, in what currencies the loans had to be repaid, when the payments were falling due and who the national debtors were. The idea of creating a Computer-Based Debt Management System (CBDMS) came out very naturally after this experience. The Branch staffs representing UNCTAD at the Paris Club in the early 1980s confirmed this lack of information as a general situation in developing countries. The question that came up at this stage was: why debtor countries did not have a CBDMS? There were two major reasons why the debtor countries did not have accurate debt data and a performing CBDMS. The first one was the lack of centralisation of information on foreign debt and inefficient legislation on public guarantees. The second one was the lack of availability of debt managers to produce comprehensive specifications for computer specialists. The urgent nature of the problems that a debt manager had to solve at the time would lead him to address specific punctual problems, for instance preparing the Paris Club and then preparing the negotiations with private banks. This will imply the collection of data in two different databases and the development of two different computer systems. These two systems once developed they would be interfaced, the outcome being an inflexible and unpractical computer patchwork inefficient and expensive to maintain. DMFAS First Version In 1981, Kombo Moyana left UNCTAD to join Mr Bernard Chidzero, former Deputy Secretary-General of UNCTAD and Minister of Finance in Zimbabwe at the time. Other members of the Branch had to cover Sub-Saharan Africa waiting for the replacement of Mr Moyana. In particular, Mr Cosío-Pascal covered Liberia, Madagascar and Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo). Four countries, in 1981, agreed to form the initial DMFAS pool—contributing from their national United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) funds to a common technical cooperation fund with UNCTAD—that allowed the development of the first version. Those countries were two from Latin America: Bolivia and Costa Rica and two from Africa: Liberia and Madagascar. These resources allowed hiring a systems analyst, Pekka Sankala Finland and a programmer, Ms Cameron Turkey.