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Janet Zhou

Why Africa Should Take the Debt Fight to the UN

Author: Published on: Published in: Debt and Fiscal Justice

On 1 September 2026, G20 finance ministers met in Asheville, North Carolina, under the United States presidency. Their chair’s statement acknowledged “the need for faster and more predictable debt treatments”. It reaffirmed the Common Framework. Then it named its main deliverable on debt: an “illustrative, non-binding template memorandum of understanding, which details the key terms of a sovereign debt treatment”.

Six years into a debt crisis, the creditors’ club has produced a form letter and described it as non-binding.

What the waiting costs

Between 2021 and 2023, Africa spent US$70 per person on interest payments. Over the same period it spent US$63 per person on education and US$44 per person on public health. Those figures come from UNCTAD. Twenty-two African countries paid more in interest than they spent educating their children.

Interest is a prior claim on the budget. It is paid before the nurse, before the textbook, before the borehole. Every month a restructuring drags on is a month those numbers hold.

Any debt architecture should be judged on two things: how fast it moves, and how much relief it delivers when it arrives.

Ethiopia tests both. It sought treatment under the Common Framework in early 2021. It defaulted on its US$1 billion Eurobond in December 2023. In January 2026 the Official Creditor Committee rejected a proposed bondholder deal on the grounds that private investors were taking too small a haircut. Ethiopia’s own finance ministry published an assessment calling the published terms non-compliant with comparability of treatment. A revised agreement in principle followed on 29 June 2026. The Official Creditor Committee validated it on 22 August 2026, describing the net relief as relatively low.

Five and a half years from application to a validated agreement in principle. Zambia’s experience runs on a similar clock: default in November 2020, agreements with official creditors concluded only in 2024.

The Common Framework was announced in November 2020 as the answer to pandemic-era distress. It has spent most of its life arguing with itself about comparability of treatment between official and private creditors. Ethiopia’s case shows the argument is still live. A template memorandum of understanding does nothing about that, because a template binds nobody.

By UNCTAD’s 2023 accounting, private creditors held 61 per cent of Africa’s external public debt. Multilateral institutions held 26 per cent. Bilateral creditors held 14 per cent. The Common Framework is a coordination mechanism among bilateral official creditors. It is built to move the smallest slice of the stock, and it can only reach the rest by persuasion.

Pricing compounds the damage. Developing regions have borrowed at rates two to four times those available to the United States. African sovereigns therefore pay a premium to accumulate the debt, then wait years for a mechanism that can restructure a seventh of it. The architecture is expensive going in and slow coming out.

Africa’s place in the G20 has shrunk

The G20’s authority over African debt rests on a claim of representation. That claim is thinner in 2026 than at any point since the African Union took its seat.

South Africa, the only African state with permanent G20 membership, announced in January 2026 that it would temporarily withdraw from G20 engagements for the duration of the United States presidency. Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana confirmed the position at Davos, framing it as a temporary setback and signalling a return under the United Kingdom’s 2027 presidency. The decision followed the United States boycott of the Johannesburg summit and an explicit threat to bar South Africa from meetings it hosts.

The April 2026 finance ministers’ meeting in Washington closed with no communiqué and no chair’s statement at all. The leaders’ summit is scheduled for December 2026 at a Trump-owned resort in Doral, Florida.

The borrowing continues regardless. S&P Global Ratings projected in March 2026 that African sovereigns would borrow US$155 billion this year, up from US$140 billion in 2025. Outstanding commercial debt is set to pass US$1.2 trillion, reaching some 45 per cent of GDP.

African states are raising record volumes of debt while the forum that governs restructuring narrows its agenda, loses its only African permanent member, and cannot agree a communiqué.

What Sevilla actually delivered

The alternative venue is the United Nations, and the honest account of it is mixed.

At the Fourth Financing for Development Conference in Sevilla in July 2025, member states agreed by consensus to open an intergovernmental process under UN auspices to make recommendations for closing gaps in the debt architecture. They agreed to establish a forum for borrowing countries. They endorsed work on debt service suspension clauses, a global debt data registry, and standards for responsible borrowing and lending.

What they did not agree was the thing that matters most. The African Union Commission had called for a legally binding instrument. Language committing governments to a process capable of delivering a UN Framework Convention on Sovereign Debt was fought paragraph by paragraph, and the European Union treated it as a red line. Eurodad names the group that worked to strip or dilute it: the EU, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and Switzerland. The United States walked away from the negotiations altogether before the conference opened.

Those states matter more than their numbers suggest. English and New York law govern the overwhelming share of African external commercial debt, and their courts enforce it. The states best placed to bind private creditors are the states that refused to be bound.

That refusal is the substance of the dispute. Everything else is drafting.

The borrowers organise

Something real did come out of Sevilla. On 15 April 2026, during the Spring Meetings in Washington, thirty developing countries launched the first Borrowers’ Platform. Egypt chairs it, Pakistan is vice-chair, and Colombia, Honduras, Maldives, Nepal and Zambia sit on the working group. UNCTAD provides the secretariat. António Guterres called it “a breakthrough in global financing”, a space in which “borrowing countries sit together, learn from each other and speak with a collective voice”.

Creditors have coordinated through the Paris Club since 1956. Borrowers acquired a standing forum seventy years later. The asymmetry that fact reveals is the whole argument for reform.

The Platform’s value depends on what it is used for. Peer learning and debt management support are useful. They will not shift the balance of power on their own. A borrowers’ caucus becomes serious when it moves from sharing experience to agreeing common terms: shared red lines on comparability, a common position on standstill during negotiation, coordinated refusal of restructuring terms that fail a human rights and development test. Creditors coordinate to protect recovery rates. Borrowers can coordinate to protect budgets.

What a convention has to contain

Calling for a convention means little without specifying what goes in it. Five provisions carry the weight.

An automatic, enforceable standstill on debt service once a country initiates restructuring, protected against litigation in creditor jurisdictions. Delay is currently a creditor asset. It should become a creditor cost.

Comparability of treatment made justiciable rather than aspirational. Ethiopia’s dispute with its Official Creditor Committee happened because comparability is a principle with no adjudicator. A convention supplies one.

Debt sustainability assessments that count the cost of meeting human rights and climate obligations before calculating what is available for creditors. Current assessments treat education and health spending as residuals. That sequencing is a political choice dressed as arithmetic.

Statutory backing in the jurisdictions that govern the contracts, binding holdout creditors to agreed terms. Without legislation in London and New York, a convention is an appeal to conscience.

A binding transparency regime covering the full stock: a public registry of loan contracts, collateralised and resource-backed deals included, with disclosure obligations that fall on creditors as well as borrowers. Mozambique’s hidden loans showed what undisclosed borrowing does to a budget, and the lenders who structured those contracts largely escaped the consequences. A registry also makes the case for relief auditable, which matters when the argument turns to which debts were legitimately contracted and which were not.

The next twelve months

The Second Committee of the General Assembly takes up financing for development during the eighty-first session. The intergovernmental process agreed at Sevilla needs teeth, a timetable, and African capitals pushing it with the discipline the African Group brought to the tax convention. That campaign proved a UN treaty process can be opened and sustained over the objection of the same creditor states now blocking on debt. The precedent is fresh and it is ours.

Three tasks follow for African governments.

Arrive with a common position, adopted by the African Union and defended by finance ministers rather than delegated to missions in New York. Use the Borrowers’ Platform to pilot the standstill and comparability terms a convention would later codify. Legislate at home: parliamentary approval for all sovereign borrowing, full publication of loan contracts, and audit of contingent liabilities. Zimbabwe’s constitution already requires the state to borrow within limits set by Parliament and to report on those borrowings. The gap between that text and current practice is a domestic failure, and naming it honestly strengthens the external case rather than weakening it.

The Doral summit in December will produce a communiqué if the Americans want one. It will not produce a treaty. African finance ministers should attend without illusion and invest their political capital where a binding instrument is actually on the table.

Asheville offered a template. A template asks creditors to be reasonable. A treaty requires them to be bound.

Janet Zhou

Sources

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Janet (Jay) is a pan-African feminist, a practitioner, and activist with over 15 years of experience in the civil society sector in Southern Africa. She is a transformative change influencer, and a leader experienced in conceptualizing and executing people-centered development programs in the civil society sector. She is a writer and author on economic justice focusing on the inclusion of marginalized groups and communities to influence policy change. In recognition of her brave work, Janet was recognized as the US State Secretary Anti-corruption Champion award in 2022. She has also been awarded the Director of the Year in Zimbabwe award for her impactful leadership in the CSO sector in the country. She was also named as one of the top 50 Emerging Women Leaders in 2022. She has served as the Executive Director for the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development (ZIMCODD), and as the Southern Africa People’s Solidarity Network (SAPSN) Secretary General. She is currently working for Southern Africa Trust as Country Manager Zimbabwe/ Economic Justice Lead.

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