Public & Social Infrastructure · December 2025 · 9 min read
Multi-currency FX exposure in DPI programme budgets
Digital public infrastructure programmes across Africa are almost always funded by a coalition of donors in a coalition of currencies. The budget the ministry publishes is denominated in local currency. The exposure that determines whether the budget holds is denominated in four others.
The argument
A DPI programme with tranches in EUR, USD, JPY and local currency is running a multi-currency book without a treasury function. Vendor contracts are typically denominated in the donor currency but paid on delivery in local currency, exposing the programme to the FX path between commitment and delivery. Modelling those paths jointly — with the correlations that actually hold in the region, not the ones assumed by the base case — usually surfaces a material FX exposure that had been sitting in no one's line of sight.
What we see in the field
On an illustrative audit, several donor tranches carry FX exposure between commitment and disbursement that the programme office has not aggregated. Once aggregated, the exposure is typically larger than the programme's contingency line and larger than the exposure any single donor believed they were carrying.
What it changes
For ministries, aggregating multi-donor FX exposure into a single view is a treasury function the programme office rarely runs. For donors, an unaggregated view is a shared blind spot that produces the same overruns cycle after cycle.
Where to start
For any DPI programme with more than two funding currencies, produce a single aggregated FX-exposure view and price the downside shortfall. Attach the number to the programme's contingency, not to the risk register.
