The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have approved debt-reduction packages for 26 countries, 22 of them in Africa, under the enhanced Initiative for the Heavily-Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC). These packages will provide nominal debt service relief of about $41 billion ($25 billion in net present value terms). Taken together with other traditional debt relief mechanisms and additional voluntary bilateral debt forgiveness, these countries will see their debts fall, on average in net present value terms, by about two thirds, according to the IMF.