Transparency of debt information is good for everyone. It gives lenders more certainty about the basis upon which they are lending, it gives borrowers lower interest rates, and it allows citizens to subject lending and borrowing by their governments to more scrutiny, including through holding public debt audits into borrowing and lending decisions. 

The Jubilee Debt Campaign has released the report: ‘Double standards: How the UK promotes rip-off health PPPs abroad’ (24 pages, with a 4 page executive summary).

This new report, published by a coalition of UK and African organisations, including Eurodad members Global Justice Now and Jubilee Debt Campaign, makes a series of recommendations as to how the system extracting wealth from Africa could be dismantled.

In January 2017 the government of Mozambique defaulted on a bond interest payment. Ghana is already dependent on loans from the IMF and World Bank to pay the high interest on loans from private lenders. Many of these debts are under the jurisdiction of the UK, with over 90% of subSaharan African government bonds owed under English law.

The UK was one of the first countries to develop PPPs in the early 1990s, and its PPP programme, known as the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), subsequently expanded across all parts of public spending including healthcare, education and the military.

Ghana is in a debt crisis. Having had significant amounts of debt cancelled a decade ago, the country is losing around 30% of government revenue in external debt payments each year.

This report investigates the debts owed by countries as a whole – both their governments and the private sector – minus the debts owed to them. It finds that the level of such debts owed between countries has risen from $11.3 trillion in 2011 to $13.8 trillion in 2014, and predicts that in 2015 they will increase further to $14.7 trillion.

Eurodad member Jubilee Debt Campaign have put together a briefing of six key facts about Greece’s debt ahead of the country's elections on Sunday 25th January.