A report by a coalition of NGOs accuses the IMF of a failure to change its damaging stance over the years and of working against the interests of the people of the South.
A document produced by a coalition of NGOs (ActionAid, Education International and the Tax and Education Alliance) challenges the IMF’s stance on its policy towards indebted countries, particularly in Africa.
The coalition examined the ‘recommendations’ issued by the Washington-based institution over three years, concerning 11 countries including Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Uganda and Senegal.
They found that, whilst the IMF’s stance has indeed evolved – the institution now expresses concerns about inequality and the need to support vulnerable people – it claims to have “strengthened its commitment to social spending issues”, but this has not been met.
The IMF has published ‘compelling’ reports in which it argues that countries can, and should, increase their tax revenues in order to make significant progress towards achieving the SDGs.
The IMF states that it incorporates a gender perspective into its policies and maintains that reducing gender disparities goes hand in hand with economic growth, stability, resilience and reductions in income inequality.
However, the NGOs lament what they call a gap between the rhetoric in Washington and the advice given to countries. “Overall, we found that the IMF’s policy recommendations, in practice, had changed little from those formulated during the discredited era of structural adjustment programmes”, they claim.
The ‘recommendations’ are based on the premise that it is paramount for countries to repay their debts, without offering systemic solutions to tackle the structural causes of debt crises. This situation “has persisted”, state the report’s authors, even as 54 countries worldwide were in debt crisis.
Barely recognised standards
“Countries were forced by the IMF to repay their debts, even if this meant exploiting women’s paid and unpaid labour to unsustainable levels, even if people had to take on additional household debt to access healthcare or died prematurely due to a lack of health services, and even if millions of children were deprived of their right to education”, the report states. The authors assert: “For the IMF, there is no systemic crisis as long as creditors are repaid.”
Among other criticisms, the authors point out that the IMF has failed to establish a link between debt and social spending. “Across all eight African countries studied, no IMF document compared external debt repayments with spending on health or education, nor did it assess the policy trade-offs, even though debt servicing exceeded health expenditure in seven of these eight African countries.”
Furthermore, debt restructuring, when it was decided upon, “was insufficient and came too late”. Even today, debt assessments ignore social aspects. The report goes on to suggest that countries under IMF supervision have “remained trapped”. After years of continuous conditionalities imposed by the IMF, of the eight African countries studied, two were in a situation of excessive debt, three were at high risk and three at moderate risk.
The report’s authors also question the nature of the social spending advocated by the IMF. This does not fall under social protection but essentially consists of targeted social assistance, without any analysis of the underlying problems.
Generally, in education and health, the IMF’s recommendations fall short of recognised standards. In most cases, the IMF advocates reducing the public sector wage bill, even when public services are understaffed.
On tax matters, the institution adheres to the dogma of a minimum tax-to-GDP ratio of 15%, which is ‘invariably insufficient’. It is true that many countries still fall below this threshold.
Cooking up a recipe that doesn’t work
The report’s authors criticise the IMF for peddling the same austerity narrative in every country, without either proposing local solutions or advocating global debt cancellation or calling for the creation of a fairer global debt architecture.
The authors are referring here to the Framework Convention presented to the United Nations by African countries at the Conference on Development (FID4), held in Seville (Spain) in 2025.
The coalition of NGO conclude: “Today’s IMF is the IMF of our grandparents, which continues to serve the interests of Northern governments, creditors and multinationals, and which is absolutely not accountable to the people whose lives and livelihoods it shapes and controls.”
According to ActionAid, the IMF plays a central role in this colonial international financial architecture that persists to this day. It will never serve the interests of the people of the Global South, as it is designed to enable their exploitation. In short, it continues to follow the same failed formula.
The authors of the report suggest that the United Nations should vote, in 2027, on a new convention on sovereign debt, modelled on the resolution passed on reparations for the era of slavery.
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NGO coalition slams IMF
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