Category: Debt Cancellation

An FT story published over the weekend injected a burst of rare optimism into the African debt relief discussion. The article by U.S.-based Markets Correspondent Camilla Hodgson reported on last Tuesday's remarks by Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian that Beijing had reached debt relief ...

African appeals for Chinese debt relief have until recently been somewhat vague and indirect, at least publicly. Well, that changed when the spokesman for Edgar Lungu released details of Zambian president's call on Monday with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping.  “President ...

World Bank President David Malpass (photo) told Bloomberg that he's confident private creditors will somehow come up with a way to restructure the $140+ billion of bond debt that poor countries owe investors. “The view of the international community was very ...

Mariana Rudyak, a prominent China scholar at the University of Heidelberg in Germany who specializes in Chinese foreign aid, provided a short assessment of President Xi Jinping's announcement that Beijing would cancel interest-free loans due before the end of the year.

Xi Jinping delivered the keynote address at a hastily arranged virtual African leaders summit on Wednesday where the Chinese president reaffirmed Beijing's commitment to provide financial and material support to combat the pandemic. There was very little new information contained in ...

Hopes for a consolidated African debt relief package from both private creditors and Chinese lenders appear to be fading. On Friday, news came that a coalition, the Africa Private Creditor Working Group or AfricaPCWG, representing 25 large asset managers and institutions had been formed to negotiate with borrowers. 

Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni said in a speech this week that because the COVID-19 outbreak is not the fault of his or any African country that the continent's international creditors should in turn help by canceling all of its debts. “The ...

There's growing anticipation over how China will respond to Africa's calls for debt relief amid the worsening COVID-19 crisis that is ravaging economies across the continent. So far, there have only been a few hints as to how China will proceed, ...

With economic conditions across Africa rapidly deteriorating, leaders across the continent are escalating their calls for the international community to provide emergency debt relief. Until this week, though, those appeals have been broadly targeted, not singling out any particular country ...

Ghana's Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta became the first senior-level African official to specifically call on China for help in relieving the spiraling African debt crisis. Until now, African leaders had issued general appeals to the "international community" for debt relief but never mentioned any individual creditors like ...

It's been just over two weeks since Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed issued the first call on behalf of African leaders for emergency debt relief. Since then, there hasn't been much movement on the issue in part because those appeals were broadly targeted at "international ...

The Kenya State House public a four-part Twitter thread that renewed calls on behalf of African leaders for emergency debt relief to handle the burgeoning economic and public health crisis brought on by the COVID-19 outbreak. President Uhuru Kenyatta met with his South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa ...