Who Governs Development? How successive institutions came to shape the terms on which development is financed
In 2025, debt service payments exceeded public spending on education in 113 countries across the Global South, a group encompassing some 6.1 billion people (UNESCO, 2026). In sub-Saharan Africa, governments now direct on average 3.6 times more of their public resources toward creditors than toward classrooms, a ratio that climbs to 3.8 times in the poorest countries in the region.
The obvious response is to treat this as a debt problem, a ratings problem, or an education financing problem, each with its own fix. None of those fixes explain why the same pattern recurs across a century of African development finance, under institutions that shared almost nothing except one thing: the authority to decide on what terms development would be financed at all, an authority that has rarely, if ever, sat inside the country or even continent being developed.
