Ask your MP to write to the Prime Minister to call for urgent action on the debt crisis.
Listen to our webinar recording about how low-income countries like South Sudan are struggling with huge debt burdens.
"Shouldn't all debts just be repaid?" Read the answer to this and other questions about the global debt crisis.
Everything you need to run our new petition about the global debt crisis in your parish this summer.
Hope Adero is a student at the University of Notre Dame (USA) and CAFOD volunteer. Originally from Uganda, she explains why the current global debt crisis has deep roots in the past.
Africa's debt crisis may look modern - with spreadsheets, bond markets, IMF missions - but its roots are run through colonial soil. The structures trapping countries today were designed during colonisation, and continue to be preserved by former colonial powers even after independence.
The boldest colonial debt strategy was making colonies pay for independence. Haiti defeated France in 1804. France forced Haiti to compensate slave owners for 'lost property' - these were the enslaved people themselves. This 'independence debt' of 150 million francs took 122 years to repay, consuming 80% of government budgets. France got paid twice: slavery profits, then debt payments for ending slavery. Haiti remains the western hemisphere's poorest country. The debt destroyed development before it could begin.
French African colonies faced similar extortion. At independence (1960), France imposed secret agreements: deposit 50% of reserves in Paris, grant French companies first refusal on resources and accept French military intervention. Fourteen African countries still lack their own sovereign currencies, instead using the Central African Franc to this day. They can't print their own currency. This means that the monetary policy that affects these countries is set in Paris, rather than African capitals.
Colonies were designed as resource exporters, and their economies are still designed so that their former colonisers can cheaply extract raw materials. While Côte d'Ivoire grows cocoa, France processes the chocolate. While Zambia mines copper, Britain manufactures the technology. Traditional industries were destroyed. Land was seized for cash crops. Any local manufacturing competing with European goods was banned.
Sixty years after independence, this persists. If Ghana exports raw cocoa and imports expensive chocolate, it can’t grow its own domestic industries and grow its economy. Zambia exports copper concentrate and imports finished products. Furthermore, when commodity prices crash - which they often do - being trapped in reliance on imports leaves African economies exposed and export revenues collapse. Debt obligations remain fixed. Crisis follows. This isn't accidental policy failure; it's the result of inherited colonial systems.
We are calling on the UK government to do two urgent things in 2026 to address the global debt crisis:
Pass legislation to ensure private lenders can no longer make huge profits from countries struggling with unsustainable debts
Use the UK's presidency of the G20 in 2027 to fix the global debt system.
Colonial powers didn't truly relinquish control. In many cases, former colonial powers like the UK effectively outsourced it to handpicked dictators. Mobutu ruled DRC for 32 years with western backing. He borrowed $12+ billion, and embezzled $5+ billion to Swiss banks. The World Bank and IMF kept lending because Mobutu protected western mining interests. When Mobutu fell, DRC inherited the debt. The population, which never benefited, services obligations created by a western-backed dictator.
This pattern has been repeated time and time again. France, for example, supported dictators in Togo, Gabon and Chad. They borrowed massively, protected foreign interests, stole the proceeds, and left their populations with unsustainable debt for which ordinary people continue to pay the price.
The 1884 Berlin Conference carved up the African continent with no regard for existing societies. Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Chad, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe were all landlocked by colonial design, making export costs 2-3 times higher. These borders have also created ethnic tensions, contributing to conflicts that have generated military costs and huge reconstruction debts, and that continue to contribute to conflicts raging today - including in countries to which the UK government has recently cut its humanitarian aid.
When the 1980s debt crises hit, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - based in Washington DC - stepped in with economic conditions that replicated colonial policies. IMF bailout conditions required countries to privatise state-owned businesses, open their markets to foreign competition, liberalise trade, focus on export agriculture, and cut social spending, often damaging local industries and long-term development.
Ghana was a particularly stark example. Under IMF programmes, its post-independence industrialisation was dismantled and the country was effectively returned to its colonised role: exporting raw materials like cocoa, and importing expensive manufactured goods from wealthier countries.
Today's debt extracts wealth, just like colonialism did, it just uses financial tools rather than military ones. Interest flows from African taxpayers to bondholders in New York, London and Paris. If colonialism was theft and debt structures perpetuate colonial extraction, shouldn't colonial debt be offset against financial debts supposedly owed? In short: debt cancellation isn't charity, it's repairing historical theft.
