(Bloomberg) -- Ecuador’s President-elect Daniel Noboa will name Sariha Moya, a career planning official, as the country’s next finance minister in charge of steering the crisis-prone dollarized economy, according to three people close to his transition team.

Moya, who is currently in Washington attending official gatherings with Noboa before heading to New York, is being introduced as Ecuador’s incoming finance chief in meetings with multilateral lenders and investment bankers, the people said, asking not be named discussing private information. 

Aides to Noboa confirmed Moya’s future appointment.

Read More: How a Few Bad Years Took Ecuador From Stability to ‘Narco State’

On Sunday, the president-elect and Moya together with future cabinet ministers including designated Foreign Minister Gabriela Sommerfeld and Trade Minister Sonsoles Garcia met with officials from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, according to a post by Noboa on X, formerly Twitter. The new government will be sworn in as early as this month once a new congress is seated.

For more than six years, she has served at Ecuador’s Ministry of Government, an office that mostly deals with legislative affairs for the presidency. She led the ministry’s planning and strategic management office and as such participated in the team that negotiated with protesting Indigenous leaders in 2022.

Moya studied economics at Quito’s Catholic University and holds a master’s degree from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, according to her LinkedIn profile. On Sunday, Quito-based newspaper La Republica said Moya was the most likely pick for the ministry citing unidentified sources close to the president-elect.

Fiscal Challenges

One of Moya’s main challenges in her new role would be to tackle the fiscal shortages that put the Andean economy at risk of another debt crisis. Failure to boost government revenue, and to accelerate growth and unemployment could lead Ecuador to another default once a heavy loan repayment schedule kicks in during 2026, Noboa said Monday during one of the events in Washington that he’s attending.

“If we don’t have programs that will generate jobs, that will increase the income of the state in terms of tax revenue, in terms of exports, it will be very hard for the state to not default in ’26 and ’27,” the 35-year-old Noboa, heir to a banana fortune, said at the Inter-American Dialogue. “It’s a crucial moment that we’re going to need the help of all the multilaterals, also the private sector and governments to be able to kick start the economy, we cannot print money,” he said.

In the near term, Ecuador also needs a “bridge loan for I would say nine months” for public spending including tax breaks for companies that hire new staff, he also said, adding that he plans to swiftly submit bills to reform taxes and the energy sector.

(Updates with appointment confirmation in third paragraph, Noboa’s remarks at event in Washington from seventh paragraph.)

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