Paris Club Debt Relief Analysis for SADC Region
Frontier Dominion conducted a thematic analysis of Paris Club archive documents (2001–2024) using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to uncover debt restructuring patterns across SADC countries. The research provided actionable insights into the Paris Club’s evolving role in regional debt sustainability.
In partnership with the Southern African Institute for Policy and Research (SAIPAR), Frontier Dominion conducted a data-driven analysis of Paris Club archival materials to explore debt restructuring trends impacting the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Utilizing Python-based natural language processing tools—including gensim, pdfplumber, and nltk—we applied Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to analyze 42 documents dated from 2001 to 2024, with hyperparameters tuned to identify five dominant themes.
Our analysis revealed key debt service suspension and restructuring initiatives in Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Seychelles, and Zambia. These findings offered a nuanced view of the Paris Club’s role in fostering debt sustainability and macroeconomic stability across the region. The project demonstrates Frontier Dominion’s capacity to integrate machine learning techniques with policy research to support evidence-based decision-making in sovereign finance and development strategy.