African Leaders Push Debt Productivity Over Sustainability to Fund Development

In Nairobi this week, African leaders gathered to make a case that sounds almost heretical in the language of international finance: stop managing debt responsibly and start using it as a weapon for transformation. The shift they're proposing is not reckless. It is, they argue, the only rational response to a system that has systematically starved the continent of resources while extracting ever more from it.

Kenya's Controller of Budget, Margaret Nyakang'o, arrived at the sixth African Conference on Debt and Development having just authorized another round of debt payments. She had borrowed domestically to pay what was owed internationally—a circular trap that has become routine. Standing before delegates, she spoke not in abstractions but in the language of consequence. Africa's external debt has grown 170 percent over the past quarter-century, climbing from roughly $500 billion in 2000 to nearly $1.8 trillion today. Kenya alone carries public debt of 13 trillion shillings and counting. But the numbers that matter most are the ones that never make headlines: the share of government revenue consumed by debt service has nearly tripled since 2011, rising from just under 12 percent to about 31 percent in 2024. Every shilling that leaves the treasury to pay creditors is a shilling that does not go to a hospital, a classroom, or a county health clinic.

The injustice, Nyakang'o explained, runs deeper than volume. African countries pay more than three and a half times the bond yields demanded from the United States and roughly five times those charged to eurozone nations when they borrow for development. Meanwhile, the institutions that shape global financial rules operate as though Africa barely exists. African nations account for close to half of all lending from the International Monetary Fund since 2000 but hold only 6.5 percent of its voting power. Nearly 80 percent of rated African sovereigns are classified as high risk by major credit agencies—a designation, she suggested, that often reflects the prejudices of the raters more than the actual health of the economies being rated. The number of African countries in debt distress or at high risk of it has more than doubled in thirteen years, from nine in 2012 to twenty-five in 2025.

What Nyakang'o and Patrick Ndzana Olomo of the African Union Commission are proposing represents a philosophical reorientation. Rather than borrowing defensively—taking on debt only when absolutely necessary and then servicing it at any cost—African countries should borrow strategically, ensuring that every loan finances productive sectors and genuine economic transformation. This is what they mean by "debt productivity." It is a rejection of the premise that debt is inherently a burden to be minimized. Instead, they argue, debt should be a tool, wielded collectively and with discipline, to build the infrastructure and capacity that generates growth.

The African Union adopted a Common African Position on Debt in February 2026, and the conference this week was meant to translate that political commitment into operational reality. Olomo emphasized that member states do not want another aspirational declaration. They want mechanisms that work. The African Debt Monitoring Mechanism is being built to become operational by year's end. The Borrowers' Platform, launched in April in Washington in collaboration with the United Nations, is designed to allow African nations to coordinate their negotiating positions rather than facing creditors one at a time, isolated and weakened. Olomo framed this as essential in an era of geopolitical tension: fifty-five countries speaking with one voice carry weight that fifty-five countries speaking separately do not.

But Nyakang'o sounded a note of caution that tempered the ambition. Continental coordination will fail, she warned, without domestic discipline. Each country must strengthen its own budget oversight, its own accountability mechanisms, its own capacity to track where borrowed money actually goes. Kenya's constitutional framework gives her office independent authority to ensure that public funds are not withdrawn from the treasury without her satisfaction that the withdrawal is lawful. She called for African budget controllers and auditors general to build stronger peer networks, to share information, to speak with one voice on fiscal accountability. The fragmentation is real: fifty-five member states with vastly different debt profiles and technical capacities, many of them struggling to monitor their own spending effectively.

The challenge ahead is immense and dual-natured. Africa must simultaneously reform the global financial architecture that disadvantages it—a task that requires collective leverage and the willingness of wealthy nations to accept a more equitable system—while also building the internal institutions and discipline necessary to ensure that borrowed resources actually produce the development they are meant to finance. Nyakang'o's final words to the conference carried the weight of someone who understands both dimensions: debt justice will not be won at negotiating tables alone. It will be won or lost in how every unit of public money is tracked, authorized, and accounted for, from Nairobi across the continent. The common position on debt becomes a lived commitment only when it is backed by the unglamorous work of budget oversight and fiscal accountability.