DFI led this workshop for LATINDADD staff and partners, which discussed the very high burden of debt service in Latin America, drawing on the Debt Service Watch (DSW) 2025 database, and suggesting implications for the Jubilee debt cancellation campaign asks. 43 participants from 13 countries attended the webinar. DFI presented the methodology of the DSW database and its findings for 2025, which show that the debt crisis in LAC is worsening sharply. For the 16 Latin American countries at the workshop, average debt service has risen to 37% of revenues, 32% of spending, twice as high as education or social protection spending and three times health spending. But when all of LAC is analysed, the numbers rise much higher, to an average 49% of revenues.

Austerity is making the crisis worse, and debt conversions and refinancings are providing little or no fiscal space to increase spending on citizens’ key social needs. DFI suggested real solution: a 10% of revenues debt service cap, a 10-year debt service holiday, measures to reduce the domestic debt burden and special measures for disaster-hit countries. The workshop was highly interactive with participants validating the DSW data or providing more alternative national sources, and supporting the suggested detailed campaign planks for the Jubilee campaign.

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.