The global south needs more than tinkering at a conference: debt forgiveness is the only fair way

A street money trader repairs damaged US banknotes in Harare, Zimbabwe. Despite holding most of the world’s population, the global south has a minority of voting power in institutions such as the UN. Photograph: Philimon Bulawayo/Reuters

It is 2025, and the architecture of economic power remains grossly tilted against the nations of the global south. Nowhere is this imbalance more acute – and more enduring – than in the debilitating impact of sovereign debt.

From the vast countries of Africa to the scattered but strategically vital small island developing states (Sids) of the Caribbean and the Pacific, debt has become a modern form of bondage – the chains that restrict growth, sovereignty and the basic human dignity of nations struggling to define their own path to development.