NAIROBI—Over the past two decades, feminist economists have scored several policy wins at the national level, ranging from gender-responsive budgets to increased investment in care infrastructure. But change at the international level remains stubbornly slow. The global financial architecture continues to generate policies that depend on women’s labor without accounting for it.
The International Monetary Fund–World Bank Annual Meetings in Bangkok this month offer an opportunity for policymakers to accelerate that change. More specifically, the first annual cycle of the newly launched Borrowers’ Platform will enable developing countries to share knowledge, exchange experiences, and speak collectively in debt discussions.
This forum is particularly important for African countries, where average spending on interest payments is $70 per capita, compared with $60 on education and $39 on health. Every austerity measure prescribed by a sovereign-debt restructuring determines the extent to which public services will be squeezed—and how much women will have to pick up the slack. In Kenya, a country that remains stuck in a debt trap, women spend, on average, three hours and thirty-seven minutes more than men on unpaid domestic and care work every day.
The negotiations for a United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation provide a similar opening. This effort to rewrite the global rules so that profits are taxed where economic activity occurs could help address capital flight from Africa, estimated at $88.6 billion annually and driven partly by tax evasion. The outcome of the negotiations will determine how much African governments have left over for clinics, schools, and water systems, and how much will be relegated to social reproduction—the unpaid or underpaid work, done most often by women and girls, that sustains life and makes all economic activity possible.
To be sure, women’s rights are often overlooked in times of upheaval. Gender equality was first on the chopping block when donor governments tightened their foreign-aid budgets, and feminist foreign policies were quietly shelved when they became inconvenient. Now the UN is weighing whether to fold UN Women and the UN Population Fund into one entity in a bid for “efficiency” precisely when those institutions are most needed.
But it is possible to rebuild global economic governance with a feminist approach. Negotiators for the UN Tax Convention should consider where social reproduction occurs, not just where multinationals are based, and allocate resources accordingly. As for the IMF, the debt restructuring process must be overhauled to assess not only whether a government can service its obligations, but also what these payments will cost in public services and women’s time.
The latter requires measuring and valuing social reproduction. Kenya found that, in 2021, women accounted for 25.8 billion hours out of a total 30.6 billion hours of unpaid domestic and care work, which the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics estimated was equivalent to 23.1% of GDP. Using these data, Kenya has since developed a National Care Policy aimed at integrating care planning into national and county budgets. In 2025, Mauritius showed how to translate this awareness into fiscal policy by zero-rating VAT on infant food and staple vegetables. The IMF could make social reproduction visible at the international level by incorporating national household satellite accounts into Article IV consultations, its regular economic assessments of member countries.
African countries are leading the way on this front, and the multilateral financial architecture must support, not impede, their efforts. As the late development economist Thandika Mkandawire spent much of his career arguing, African governments were never short on policy ideas. But they were denied the space to do their own theorizing; instead, they were saddled with the theories underpinning stringent loan conditions.
The African Union’s Common African Position on Debt (CAP), adopted in February, is an attempt to conceptualize a new approach. It calls for a binding UN Framework Convention on Sovereign Debt—the hoped-for structural overhaul that did not materialize at last year’s Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development—and restructuring processes that are transparent, debtor-inclusive, and no longer driven solely by creditor interests. The Borrowers’ Platform may be a voluntary coordination mechanism rather than a binding negotiating body, but that is all the more reason to advocate the CAP at the Annual Meetings.
Members of the Borrowers’ Platform should propose two concrete policy changes. First, the IMF must reform its debt-sustainability analysis, the framework it uses to determine how much debt a country can afford to service, to incorporate what repayment costs in social reproduction. This would allow African governments to shield public services from cuts. Otherwise, more countries may end up like Kenya: the National Treasury reports that 51.8% of tax revenue in the last fiscal year went to debt and pension payments, leaving hardly any funds for the social programs that reduce women’s unpaid work. Second, when negotiating debt-restructuring deals, every IMF program tied to a debt restructuring must include a binding floor on spending for health, water, and care infrastructure, replacing the soft, often-missed social spending targets the Fund uses today.
What may seem like technical adjustments are actually the first steps toward creating a debt architecture that will deliver for the women of Africa. Writing about the pandemic, the novelist Arundhati Roy argued that rupture offers “a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves.” The multilateral system is undergoing its own rupture now. The task ahead is to ensure that the women of Africa are not a footnote to the system, but rather central to what comes next.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2026.
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