The debt loads bearing down on lower-income countries, particularly those in Africa, are often framed around a dizzying array of statistics that get into the technical weeds. But the human element is often missing from the piles of percentages, even though debt servicing is hoovering up money for development, resulting in real-life repercussions for millions of people.
So the African Center for Economic Transformation, or ACET, is trying to humanize the numbers by calculating what they mean for a variety of indicators ranging from basic sanitation to education to maternal mortality. Its new report offers three scenarios that project what the impact would be on those indicators if debt servicing costs were capped at 5%, 10%, and 14% of government revenue.
“People don't actually know what it is costing ordinary Africans for us to … make the debt repayments we are making,” Mavis Owusu-Gyamfi, president and CEO of ACET, told Devex, noting that when we “start putting these into lives affected, it becomes tangible. It's no longer all of us sitting in meeting rooms, talking about numbers.”
About the author
Anna Gawel
Anna Gawel is the Managing Editor of Devex. She previously worked as the managing editor of The Washington Diplomat, the flagship publication of D.C.’s diplomatic community. She’s had hundreds of articles published on world affairs, U.S. foreign policy, politics, security, trade, travel and the arts on topics ranging from the impact of State Department budget cuts to Caribbean efforts to fight climate change. She was also a broadcast producer and digital editor at WTOP News and host of the Global 360 podcast. She holds a journalism degree from the University of Maryland in College Park.
