WORLD LEADERS: WHEN WILL THE INJUSTICE STOP?

The Justice for Africa campaign, All-Africa Students Union, Global Student Forum and 100 Million today released a report summarising the shocking increase in extreme poverty in Africa in the last 20 years.

The report details how two decades of failure and injustice by high income countries, and the institutions they control, have harmed Africa and asks When Will The Injustice Stop?

Released ahead of tomorrow's meeting of the World Bank and IMF Development Committee the report's key findings include:

• Africa’s share of global poverty has jumped from 25% to 67% in just 20 years.

• Over 97% of the 303 million people living in a debt distress country are African and debt servicing payments from sub-Saharan Africa cost nearly $2 billion a week, more than is received in aid.

• The Debt Crisis was created by four major international factors outside of Africa’s control: rich country quantitative easing, Africa’s exclusion from the world’s COVID-19 response, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the IMF’s discriminatory allocation of SDRs.

• Growing Aid Discrimination means sub-Saharan African countries received just one in six dollars of bilateral ODA funding in 2022 even though two-thirds of the world extremely poor live there. This bias means Africa has missed out on over $400 billion since 2016 alone.  

• The sub-Saharan African region contributed the least to climate change yet is the most vulnerable to its impacts due to Climate Injustice. Africa is also deprioritised for climate finance. On average a person living in sub-Saharan African today produces 30% of the CO2 emissions of an American in 1870.

• The impact of these injustices means that since the SDGs started, over 10 million more African children are out of school, 20 million more African children are in child labour, 60 million more Africans are living in extreme poverty and 45 million more African children go hungry.  At the same time, world GDP has increased by $17 trillion, and we have created two new billionaires a week.

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It also summarises the wider Unequal Education, Unequal Future report and demands that leaders of rich countries, their central banks and international institutions acknowledge their contribution to the huge recent increases in extreme poverty in Africa and the major crisis African countries and African children now face.

When Will The Injustice Stop? urges world leaders to act to end the injustices on debt, aid, climate and tax including balancing the discriminatory 2021 SDR issue to cancel debt, adopting a new 0.3% GNI target for ODA to sub-Saharan Africa, giving Africa its share of climate finance, and supporting the UN tax convention.

DOWNLOAD THE REPORT