Following the 2024 Commitment to Reducing Inequality report, DFI has partnered with the African Council of Churches and a group of Scandinavian civil society organisations (Norwegian Church Aid, ACT Church of Sweden, and Felm), to produce a report analysing the extreme levels of inequality in Eastern and Southern Africa and defining a policy agenda to cut it dramatically.  

Eastern and Southern Africa is a global epicentre of extreme inequality, with two-thirds of its countries having very high income inequality, and even higher wealth inequality. Extreme inequality is increasing poverty and hunger, corroding politics, destroying citizen trust in governments, and sparking political unrest, fuelling division, and slowing growth.

The report finds that most of the governments in Eastern and Southern Africa are rowing backwards on policies to reduce inequality, so it will rise even higher in future. Since 2022, 80% of governments have cut spending on key anti-inequality social programmes; 50% have made their tax systems less progressive; and 90% have failed to apply minimum labour rights (especially for women) and allowed minimum wages to fall way behind high inflation. In addition, the region is now being hit by its worst ever debt crisis, austerity and aid cuts. Based on these findings, the report defines an urgent policy agenda for governments to accelerate their efforts to fight inequality, and for the international community to help them through comprehensive debt relief, an end to austerity and more concessional financing.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) aims to provide quality and equitable education to all by 2030. Progress has been slow and virtually nil post-COVID. As a result, only one in six countries is predicted to meet the goal. Post-COVID, gaps in education completion and learning outcomes between the global North and South are growing, and 84 million children may be out of school in 2030.

This briefing shows that a large and escalating debt crisis is already derailing SDG 4. Since 2015, the share of budgets devoted by governments to education has fallen from 14.4% to 13.7%, and only 13.1% in low- income countries. This is mainly because (as shown by the Debt Service Watch database) debt service is increasingly pushing aside other spending, absorbing an average of 42% of all government spending in 2024 (rising to 47% in 2025). Globally, debt servicing exceeds education budgets by 2.8 times. Among LICs and LMICs - who have the largest financing needs to meet SDG 4 – it is 2.9 and 3.1 times higher; and the same is true for the regions furthest behind on SDG4 – Africa (3.2 times) and Asia (2.9 times). In 16 countries, debt service is more than five times as high as education spending.

The UN Global Education Monitoring report has estimated that the financing gap for meeting SDG 4 (in LICs and LMICS) is US$100 billion a year during 2024-2030. DFI calculates that a debt relief package that brought down debt service to 10% of budget revenue for lower-income debt distressed countries (and reduced borrowing costs for countries which have to access global markets regularly to fund their budgets) could generate US$500 billion a year, or more than 4 times this education financing gap. There can be no recovery for SDG 4 without urgent action to tackle debt. To move forward, the education community must join others in calling for urgent and bold international action to sharply reduce debt service through enhanced debt relief, together with more concessional financing and enhanced budget revenue collection, to fund SDG4.