This paper estimates an early warning system (EWS) for predicting systemic banking crises in a sample of
low income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Since the average duration of crises in this sample of countries
is longer than one year, the predictive performance of standard binomial logit models is likely to be
hampered by the so-called crisis duration bias. The bias arises from the decision to either treat crisis years
after the onset of a crisis as non-crisis years or remove them altogether from the model. To overcome this
potential drawback, we propose a multinomial logit approach, which is shown to improve the predictive
power of our EWS compared to the binomial logit model. Our results suggest that crisis events in low
income countries are associated with low economic growth, drying up of banking system liquidity and
widening of foreign exchange net open positions.