• Inform stakeholders of the legal and institutional framework within which the Forum is published and disseminated;
• Provide editorial policy guidelines that set the required quality standards for the Forum; and,
• Lay down procedures for the sourcing and submission of contributions for publication in the Forum.

 EDITORIAL GUIDELINES 

• The Forum shall be published twice a year for the benefit of all MEFMI stakeholders;
• Contributions should be made in the English language;
• Contributions shall ordinarily be published on a continuous first-come-first-served basis, thus allowing for the deferring of some successful articles received late to subsequent issues of the Forum;
• Contributions shall be published on a voluntary or pro-bono basis, with modest honoraria being paid to only defray personal expenses incurred;
• The terms of reference of MEFMI resource persons shall provide for customization of their presentations into short background papers for the MEFMI Forum articles;
• Special contributions may be occasionally commissioned on an exceptional case-by-case basis;
• Contributions submitted for publication should be related to capacity building in macroeconomic and financial management;
• The contributions should be incisive, informative and as far as possible original, with proper acknowledgement of the work of others used, so as to avoid plagiarism;
• Contributions will only be published with the authors’ consent and their acceptance of liability for content and implications of their contributions;
• Personal details, such as authors’ names, titles, designations, name of employers and recent photographs may be inserted into respective contributions for ease of identification and reference;
• The MEFMI website versions of the Forum issues shall have been appropriately adapted for ease of access by all stakeholders under varying information technology capabilities;
• The Editor-In-Chief shall reserve the right to decline to publish articles that are inconsistent with the above guidelines and / or to annul part or all of any honoraria that may be due to the affected contributions

     LEGAL AND INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORKS The authors of articles published in the Forum are deemed to accept personal liability for the content and implications of materials they submit for publication; MEFMI shall not under any circumstance be held liable for contributions published through the Forum, and a disclaimer to this effect shall be inserted into every issue of the Forum; The MEFMI Forum shall be published and disseminated through the office of the Editor-In-Chief, which is supported at various stages by the Editorial and Tender Committees and a Networking and Publications function from within the MEFMI Secretariat; Prior written permission and /or acknowledged reference to the relevant issue of the Forum should be cited for any use of materials published in the Forum.

TARGET AUDIENCE AND CONTRIBUTORS 

The Forum shall be open for contributions and readership from a wide, diverse and expert stakeholder base from within the relevant MEFMI client institutions, member States, partners and other regional and international peers and networks; The Forum shall be distributed to stakeholders and other relevant parties in hard copy and / or in electronic form, including through posting on the MEFMI website. 

ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA 

In addition to complying with the editorial guidelines as set out above, contributions should meet the following specific criteria for eligibility for publication: 

• Contributions should be relevant to macroeconomic and financial management;
• The contributions should be topical, analytical and applied than being of a purely research or theoretical slant;
• Contributions should be concise and brief, within a maximum limit of 5000 words, excluding diagrams and other necessary illustrations;
• Contributions need to properly acknowledge others’ work, including appending of relevant bibliographies, references, etc;
• Where appropriate, prior clearance or authentication by employers or relevant authorities should be sought in cases where country-sensitive or country-specific information is involved;
• Contributions should adhere to the following lay-out:
• Title
• Author and Designation
• Overview / Executive Summary / Preamble
• Introduction
• The issues
• Purpose / objective/s
• Methodology
• Scope
• Body
• Facts
• Analysis
• Interpretation
• Conclusion / Recommendations
• Bibliography

 There should be adherence to the following submission procedures:

• Meeting submission deadlines, i.e. articles should be received 2 months prior to date of next publication;
• Submission of contributions in both hard and soft / MS-Word copies;