Sub-Saharan Africa’s economic promise is clear. It has the world’s youngest and fastest-growing population; by 2050 a quarter of the world’s working-age population will be living in Africa, with vast natural resources, and expanding regional markets. Yet these strengths are undermined by a persistent weakness: the region’s skills gap.
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The Radical Debt Transparency report—an update to 2021’s Debt Transparency in Developing Countries—shows that despite significant improvements in recent years, major debt transparency deficiencies continue to plague many developing countries. As the global financing environment tightens, several governments are turning to off-budget and increasingly complex debt instruments such as collateralized loans, private placements, and central bank swaps, that risk giving rise to new hidden debts. Gaps in legislative frameworks, institutional fragmentation, and limited oversight can contribute to debt reporting challenges, as seen in recent experiences. Transparency in debt restructuring processes also remains uneven. This report calls for a radical shift toward debt transparency as critical to debt sustainability, urging legislative reforms, stronger oversight of unconventional debt, broader loan-level reporting, and greater use of automation and reconciliation tools.
The world faces a collective action problem: countries naturally prioritize domestic investments while global challenges like climate change, pandemics, and food crises demand joint action. This creates systemic underinvestment in global public goods. Join country and development leaders at the 2025 Hamburg Sustainability Conference, as they explore ways to reshape the international finance to unlock transformative solutions. Discover the World Bank’s Framework for Financial Incentives and IDA’s Global and Regional Opportunities Window—innovative mechanisms that reward countries for projects with cross-border benefits. From energy transformation to water management, learn how small grants through the new Livable Planet Fund make big global impact possible.
For over six decades, the World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA) has
been a lifeline for low-income countries, providing them with affordable development funding when few other options exist. IDA has helped improve millions of lives and supported development results that have moved countries forward.
Over the past year, we have navigated an incredibly challenging global landscape—one marked by economic uncertainty, rising debt levels, climate shocks, and an ever-pressing need for human development. Yet, amid these challenges, something remarkable has unfolded: a collective effort, driven by the shared belief that we can do better, that we must do better, for the world’s most vulnerable.
Washington, D.C, October 24, 2024 — Spain has announced an early financial commitment of €400 million to the International Development Association, the World Bank’s fund for low-income countries. This is a 37% increase compared to the previous IDA replenishment cycle and underscores Spain’s continued commitment to sustainable development worldwide. This raises Spain’s total contribution to over €5 billion since IDA’s creation.
As we approach the high-level week of the United Nations General Assembly and the UN climate change conference COP29, the global climate agenda is being defined by intense discussions around climate finance. But largely missing from this debate is the question of who has access to this funding.
The need to channel climate finance into the hands of those most affected by climate change is well recognized. The issue is at the heart of the loss and damage talks and was central to UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s speech on World Environment Day, where he underscored how it’s “a disgrace that the most vulnerable are…struggling desperately to deal with a climate crisis they did nothing to create,” and argued that “the global financial system must be part of the climate solution.” It has also been key to COP negotiations ever since the Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage was established in 2013.
Continue readingThe 2020s were supposed to be the decade in which significant progress would be made 
toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Instead, the 2020s have delivered the weakest half-decade of global growth of the past 30 years. Weak investment growth is a major reason for this disappointing outcome.
Netherlands for the World Bank 
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