A career civil servant, Charles Koffi Diby was appointed finance minister in April 2007, a month after the Ivorian warring parties signed a reconciliation agreement at Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso. By 2009, his diligent and steadfast efforts to put the country's economy and budget back on track had started to pay dividends. The country cleared arrears to the World Bank, and qualified for debt relief under the multilateral Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative in December 2008.
This led to a $566m IMF loan package in March 2009, and the IMF praised "the authorities' new economic programme [which] provides the platform for strengthening the economic recovery and establishing the foundation for robust growth and higher living standards for the west African country's 19 million people."
