Rethinking Economics for Africa (REFA) Festival 2025 marked the seventh edition of the annual event dedicated to exploring alternative economic frameworks and critically examining dominant economic paradigms. This year’s festival took place on 5 September 2025 in Johannesburg, South Africa.
The festival’s goal is to engage youth, policymakers, academics, and activists in discussions on how economics and economic policy can better serve people and the planet. Its aim is to make economic concepts more accessible, encourage conversations around real economic issues, and promote alternative economic visions from an interdisciplinary and progressive perspective.
This year’s festival focused on gender and feminist economics, responding to the evolving economic and political landscapes across South Africa and globally. The panel’s focus was reformation of resource mobilisation with a specific focus on the UN Tax Convention and Debt Convention and their implications for African economies. Moreover, the discourse focused on Domestic Resource Mobilisation (DRM) as the key to Africa’s development agenda.
DRM plays a vital role in economic development, enabling nations to generate sufficient revenue to fund public services, decrease dependence on external borrowing, and support long-term investments in both infrastructure and social sectors. Enhancing resource mobilisation through taxation diminishes the necessity for external debt and aid. Given the challenges faced by African nations, including limited external financing and an increasing debt burden, there exists an urgent necessity to strengthen DRM to attain self-reliance, equity, and sustainability.
Consequently, DRM emerges as the most sustainable financing mechanism for numerous countries in the Global South, as it facilitates a transition from ongoing reliance on external sources such as debt and aid, and in many cases, it already surpasses Official Development Assistance (ODA) in significance.
International Financial Institutions (IFIs) like the IMF and World Bank act as tools for Western financial dominance. By implementing Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) and austerity measures, they facilitate the extraction of wealth from the Global South through debt traps, currency devaluation, dollar dependence, and trade liberalisation. They favor corporate interests over true development, thus perpetuating neocolonial exploitation. Under the guise of economic reform, they systematically shift resources from the Global South to the Global North, worsening global inequality.
Liso Mdutanya, a researcher at the Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ), presented the findings of a policy brief he co-authored, which elucidates South Africa’s IFI debt accumulation problem and proposes solutions. Between 2020/21 and 2023/24, the government borrowed over R211.7 Billion and plans to borrow roughly the same amount over 2024/25 to 2026/27. Several factors can be attributed to the attractiveness of bilateral and multilateral credit for governments over the past few years, i.e., the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent deterioration of the global bond market, which made borrowing from the market unattractive. Moreover, the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JET-P) climate financing deal features IFIs such as the African Development Bank, World Bank, and other bilateral official creditors. However, the current legal framework and institutional practices of public borrowing do not account for risks associated with loan conditionalities.
In 2020 and 2022, the country obtained two COVID-19 loans from the IMF and the World Bank, amounting to US$4.3 billion and US$750 million respectively. Transparency was limited, with the National Treasury misleading the public about the policy conditionalities attached to these loans. These conditions did not align with the loans’ objectives and were largely irrelevant. Additionally, there was clear overreach by creditors, pushing for private sector involvement in public services like the electricity market and an exclusion of parliament from the loan approval process, despite its constitutional role in approving or amending the national budget.
Moreover, the two JET-P loan programs are long-term initiatives to finance the economy's shift from dependence on carbon-based energy sources to renewable energy. Since December 2022, all government loans from IFIs have been tied to climate and energy transition goals. Unfortunately, details of the JET-P financing remain secret and the terms and conditions of the IFI loans were only revealed through a Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) request. Furthermore, the loans were not submitted to parliament, and there is no centralised record for loans and guarantees.
South Africa’s current loan situation illustrates how IFI loans often come with conditions that influence national economic policies. These institutions tend to be very political, with decision-making predominantly favoring the Global North, revealing a clear power imbalance. Nonetheless, IFI funding should not restrict policymakers and legislators from making autonomous decisions. Many countries worldwide have laws requiring Members of Parliament (MPs) to approve IFI loans, and South Africa should adopt similar measures.
The existing public debt management system must support and not hinder the realisation of socio-economic rights as mandated by the constitution. The government has a constitutional obligation to take reasonable actions to ensure citizens can access their socioeconomic rights, such as education, healthcare, social protection, and housing. Consequently, Parliament must establish oversight mechanisms to prevent the Executive from acting in ways that could infringe on these rights and to ensure citizens can exercise them freely. Lastly, the debt must be utilised to advance the country’s interests, such as domestic economic development.
The African debt crisis requires bold and sustainable solutions that go beyond short-term relief measures. African leaders have recognised the need for major reforms and, for the first time in 2025, gathered at the African Union Conference on Debt in Lome, Togo. The Lome Declaration is a commitment by African countries to reform the global financial system to address escalating debt distress.
It calls for simultaneous negotiations with all creditors, suspension of debt payments during restructuring, broader eligibility for debt relief, and a global legal mechanism for debt enforcement. The declaration also proposes African-led solutions, such as establishing a Pan-African Credit Rating Agency, promoting transparent debt management aligned with development goals, and expanding innovative financing to reduce dependence on traditional borrowing. It further urges comprehensive reforms to the global debt framework via a UN Framework Convention on Sovereign Debt, including revising the G20's common framework, improving transparency in debt restructuring, suspending debt payments during negotiations, cancelling debt to promote economic and reparative justice, and increasing access to financing and debt relief initiatives for African countries.
As previously noted, DRM remains the most sustainable method for funding public services and development. However, its success depends on stopping capital flight caused by illicit financial flows. There is also a growing need for enhanced transparency, accountability, and international cooperation. To democratise global tax governance, restore taxation as a public good and a resource mobilisation tool, and combat tax evasion by wealthy elites and multinational corporations, the creation of a UN-led Global Tax Body is essential.
The upcoming UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation, scheduled for 2027, offers a key opportunity to establish a more inclusive and multilateral tax system. Additionally, for tax systems to be genuinely gender-transformative, they must be decolonial, redistributive, and non-exploitative, dismantling colonial-era policies, redistributing wealth, and closing loopholes that enable aggressive tax avoidance practices of multinational corporations, facilitated by transfer pricing abuses, exploitative tax treaties, and the use of secrecy jurisdictions.
This article is authored by Grace Wambui Arina, Feminist Tax Initiative-Lead (TJNA/NAWI)
