While the goal of gender equality often falls by the wayside in times of upheaval, the current rupture in the multilateral order creates an opportunity to build an architecture of debt that will be delivered to African women. The first step towards achieving this goal could be taken at the IMF–World Bank Annual Meeting in Bangkok this month.
NAIROBI-Over the past two decades, feminist economists have scored several policy victories at the national level, ranging from gender-responsive budgets to increased investment in care infrastructure. But change at the international level remains stubbornly slow. The global financial architecture continues to produce policies that rely on women’s labor without accounting for it.
The International Monetary Fund–World Bank Annual Meetings in Bangkok this month provide an opportunity for policymakers to accelerate these changes. More specifically, the first annual cycle of the newly launched Borrowers’ Platform will allow developing countries to share knowledge, exchange experiences, and speak together in debt discussions.
This forum is particularly important for African countries, where the average spending on interest payments is $70 per capita, compared to $60 for education and $39 for health. Every austerity measure brought about by the restructuring of the country’s debt determines whether public services will be squeezed—and how much of the slack women will have to pick up. In Kenya, a country that remains stuck in a debt trap, women spend, on average, three hours and thirty-seven minutes more than men on unpaid household and care work each day.
The negotiations for the United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation provide a similar opening. This effort to rewrite global rules so that profits are taxed where economic activity can help address capital flight from Africa, estimated at $88.6 billion per year and partly driven by tax evasion. The outcome of these negotiations will determine how much African governments will leave for clinics, schools, and water systems, and how much will be relegated to social reproduction—unpaid or unpaid work, most often done by women and girls, which sustains life and makes all economic activities possible.
Of course, women’s rights are often overlooked during times of upheaval. Gender equality was first on the chopping block when donor governments tightened foreign aid budgets, and feminist foreign policy was quietly discarded when it became inconvenient. Now the UN is considering whether to join UN Women and the UN Population Fund into one entity in a bid for “efficiency” exactly when the institution is most needed.
But it is possible to rebuild global economic governance with a feminist approach. Negotiators for the UN Tax Convention should consider where social reproduction takes place, not just where multinationals are based, and allocate resources accordingly. For the IMF, the debt restructuring process must be overhauled to assess not only whether the government can meet its obligations, but also the cost of these payments in public services and women’s time.
The latter requires measuring and valuing social reproduction. Kenya found that by 2021, women accounted for 25.8 billion hours of a total of 30.6 billion hours of unpaid domestic work and care, which the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics estimates is equivalent to 23.1% of GDP. Using the data, Kenya began developing a National Care Policy that aims to integrate care planning into national and district budgets. By 2025, Mauritius is showing how to translate this awareness into fiscal policy with a zero-rated VAT on baby food and staple vegetables. The IMF can make social reproduction visible at the international level by integrating national household satellite accounts into Article IV consultations, regular economic assessments of member states.
African countries are leading the way on this front, and the multilateral financial architecture should support, not hinder, their efforts. As the late development economist Thandika Mkandawire spent much of her career arguing, African governments are never short of policy ideas. But they denied the space to do their own theorizing; instead, they are saddled with the theory underpinning the tight loan situation.
The African Union’s Common Position on Debt (CAP), adopted in February, is an attempt to conceptualize a new approach. This requires the United Nations Framework Convention on Public Debt – the expected structural overhaul that did not happen at the Fourth International Conference on Development Financing last year – and a transparent restructuring process, including debt, and not only driven by creditor interests. The Borrowers’ Platform may be a voluntary coordination mechanism rather than a binding negotiating body, but this is another reason to advocate CAP at the Annual Meeting.
Borrower Platform members should propose two concrete policy changes. First, the IMF must modify its debt sustainability analysis, the framework used to determine the amount of debt a country can carry, to incorporate the cost of repayment in social reproduction. This will allow African governments to protect public services from cuts. Otherwise, more countries could be like Kenya: the National Treasury reported that 51.8% of tax revenue in the last fiscal year went to debt and pension payments, leaving almost no funds for social programs that reduce unpaid work for women. Second, when negotiating a debt restructuring deal, every IMF program related to debt restructuring must include a binding floor on spending on health infrastructure, water, and treatment, replacing the soft and often missed social spending targets that the Fund currently uses.
What looks like a technical adjustment is actually the first step towards creating a debt architecture that will be delivered to African women. Writing about the pandemic, novelist Arundhati Roy said the outbreak offered “an opportunity to rethink the doomsday machine we’ve built for ourselves.” The current multilateral system is self-destructive. The task ahead is to ensure that African women are not a footnote to the system, but central to what is to come.