Since the onset of the COVID pandemic in 2020, South Africa has borrowed a total of about US$7 billion (about R106 billion). The money has come from the International Monetary Fund, the New Development Bank, the African Development Bank, and the World Bank.
The country has assumed these debts without any transparent or accessible process of public consultation or publicly available studies of the expected impacts of these loans on poverty, public health, job creation and social welfare in the country.
