Africa: Women and Africa’s debt crisis

Africa’s poverty and stagnation was last year described by Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa report as the greatest tragedy of our time. This is not unconnected with the egregious suffering and scale of underdevelopment, which is much pronounced on the continent in the midst of inexhaustible abundance (Africa is perhaps the richest continent of the world in term of natural resources).

Of course, many factors have contributed to this tragedy, right from the advent of Europeans arriving on the shore of the continent, but in the current epoch of neo-colonialism the excruciating debt crisis of Africa boldly stands out. In other words, the socio-economic crises of Africa is largely an outgrowth of the suffocating debt burden that has become a definitive feature of the continent. However, what this actually means is much more tragic for politically and socio-economically disadvantaged social groups like women.

It is not the size of Africa’s debt - put at over $300 billion - that actually implies crisis. Rather, it is the fact of the debt being an obstacle to socio-economic development on the continent. This is due to the use of the debt burden by creditors (imperialist governments and international finance institutions) as a whip to force the bitter pill of harsh economic policies called Structural Adjustment Programmes, or put more simply, neo-liberal economic reform, down the throat of the continent.

How does this affect women? Poor women bear the heaviest of the burden. The very means through which their status could be roundly improved - education, health and employment - are neglected by governments struggling to meet crippling debt repayments to their creditors and religiously implementing neo-liberal policies resulting in cuts in public/social spending. One of the major culprits of the continent’s inability to provide for the needs of its populace, the IMF, found it difficult to ignore the scary reality of things as it admitted that sub-Saharan Africa spends so much on debt payment that they have little left over for health or education (See www.data.org)

Owing to the under-funding of health care, largely arising from the debt burden, Africa has the highest ratio of maternal mortality. In 2002 the maternal mortality ratio of the world was estimated at 400 per 100,000 live births while that of Africa was 1 000 per 100,000 live births. A woman in Africa faces a 1-in-13 chance of dying in childbirth, compared with 1-in-4100 in industrialized countries. The countries with the highest maternal mortality ratio are in Africa. Among them is Democratic Republic of Congo, a country ruled and ruined by a staunch ally of the West, the late Mobutu Sese Seko. In 2002, the country’s debt service per capital expenditure was $18 while health per capita expenditure was $4.

In 2003, African countries paid over $25 billion in debt service, even as 2.3 million Africans lost their lives to AIDS. In that very year, the World Health Organisation reported that 4.1 million Africans living with AIDS were in immediate need of anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs), but only 50,000 could receive them. HIV/AIDS is a disease for which gender is inextricably associated, particularly in Africa. Inadequate access to health care and education as well as economic and social inequalities leaves African women less able to protect themselves from HIV infection. It is therefore not accidental that HIV infections in the continent are disproportionately concentrated among African poor and illiterate adolescent women.

Another area where debt is seriously implicated is food insecurity. It has been estimated that Africa will only be able to feed less than half its population by 2015. The painful SAPs implemented by Africa’s countries as conditionality for so-called debt relief are largely responsible for the endemic hunger crisis in the continent. Governments have not only abandoned interventions in food production, they have also encouraged production of cash crops at the expense of food crops in order to raise foreign exchange to service debts. It is instructive to state however that due to unfair international trade the prices of these commodities have continued to plummet on the world market.

As experiences have shown, it is women and children that are particularly vulnerable to food insecurity. Craig Timberg of The Washington Post painted a typical gloomy picture in relation to the Niger hunger crisis. Niger is one of the highly indebted poor countries (HIPCs) recently granted cancellation of multilateral debts after years of unbroken submission to SAPs. Timberg described how streams of women with breasts shriveled from malnourishment and skeletal babies strapped to their backs searched endlessly for food without success. However, it was not that there was no foods in the markets; there was plenty. But these poor women could not afford them.

Halving levels of poverty and hunger, reducing maternal mortality by three-quarters and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS are among the targets the September 2000 Summit of the United Nations set to achieve by 2015 through what is called the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). Others include achieving universal primary education and gender equality, and reducing under-5 mortality by two-thirds. The African Development Bank has said that Africa is the region least likely to meet the MDGs. The United Nations is more categorical, stating that if the current social development indicators continue, Africa will not reach the MDGs for another 150 years! Also, a UNDP and UNICEF joint report has stated that at the current rate, closing the gender gap in literacy in Africa will not be achieved before 2035. This very report then identifies the heavy debt burden as a major constraint militating against Africa achieving the MDGs.

The foregoing indicates that women, being socio-economically and politically weak, are more at the receiving end of the debt burden than what the average statistics of the parlous situation would suggest. Therefore, Africa’s debt crisis is a major issue that should attract the interest and intervention of women’s organisations. But it appears there is little literature on the effects of the debt burden on African women. Women and women’s organisations have to join and participate actively in the international campaign for the outright cancellation of Africa’s debt, along with the struggle to improve the lot of women in society.

* Mary George is an Assistant Programme Officer with Women Advocates Research and Documentation Centre (WARD C) Lagos Nigeria. She has an unpublished work entitled "Origin and Nature of Debt Crisis in Africa"

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