Key Takeaways
- Africa’s public debt has surged to an estimated $2 trillion in 2024, with a notable shift toward domestic borrowing.
- The newly launched African Debt Database (ADD) offers detailed, instrument-level data for 54 African countries from 2000-2024.
- Domestic debt issuance has more than tripled since 2010, now accounting for over half of governments’ financing.
- Borrowing costs vary significantly, with multilateral loans being the cheapest and domestic instruments the most expensive.
- Increased reliance on short-term domestic debt to refinance maturing liabilities heightens refinancing risks.
Africa’s Evolving Debt Landscape: A Closer Look
Over the past two decades, Africa’s public debt has undergone a significant transformation. Total public debt across the continent has quadrupled since the early 2000s, reaching an estimated $2 trillion in 2024. While external borrowing, including Eurobonds, Chinese loans, and multilateral financing, has often been the focus, a substantial revolution has been occurring within domestic debt markets.
Previously, a lack of comprehensive data made it challenging for analysts to thoroughly assess African governments’ domestic borrowing patterns. Existing datasets were often aggregated, self-reported, or focused solely on external debt, leaving domestic borrowing largely invisible.
Introducing the African Debt Database (ADD)
To address this critical data gap, the African Debt Database (ADD) was developed. This open-access, instrument-level dataset provides detailed information on over 50,000 loans and securities issued by 54 African countries between 2000 and 2024. Compiled from tens of thousands of primary government documents, the ADD offers an unprecedented view of both domestic and external debt, including specifics on currency, maturity, interest rates, creditor types, and issuance terms.
Building the African Debt Database
The creation of a continent-wide sovereign debt dataset was an extensive, multi-year data collection effort. It combined manual curation, automated parsing, and machine-learning tools, drawing on hundreds of national sources to capture every documented government borrowing instrument from 2000 to 2024.
Data Sources and Scope
The ADD covers all 54 African nations. For each instrument, whether a bond, bill, or loan, the dataset records critical details such as issuance and maturity dates, coupon structure, interest rate, currency, amount issued, and creditor information. It differentiates between:
- Domestic debt: Defined by the currency of denomination, this includes treasury bills and government bonds issued in local markets.
- External debt: This comprises foreign-currency loans and bonds contracted under international law.
Data for domestic debt were sourced from over 60 official websites and archives. In instances where historical records were no longer publicly accessible, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine was utilized to recover crucial information like auction calendars and bulletins. All data were then standardized to ensure comparability across different countries and time periods.
Digitization and Validation
A key advancement of the ADD is its sophisticated digitization pipeline. Thousands of PDF and scanned documents were processed using a combination of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and rule-based extraction scripts developed in Python. For documents too unstructured for automated parsing, large language models were employed to extract table-like data from text. This hybrid approach proved highly effective for semi-structured records like bond listings and auction announcements.
Each data record underwent manual verification and, where feasible, cross-checking against commercial data providers like Bloomberg and Refinitiv to guarantee accuracy. Missing yields or prices were calculated using standard fixed-income formulas, and all values were converted into US dollars using the exchange rate prevailing at the time of issuance.
In total, the database compiles approximately $6.3 trillion in nominal commitments, establishing it as the most comprehensive repository of African sovereign debt ever assembled. All associated code and documentation are openly available, enabling other researchers to replicate or expand upon the analysis.
What the New Data Reveal
This novel dataset empowers researchers and policymakers to move beyond aggregate figures and gain a granular understanding of how African governments actually borrow. Initial findings highlight four key structural facts that are reshaping the continent’s debt landscape.
1. The Domestic Debt Boom
Since 2010, the volume of domestic debt issuance has tripled, soaring from roughly $150 billion to nearly $500 billion. On average, African governments now secure more than half of their financing domestically, marking a significant reversal from decades of reliance on external lenders.
The initial phase of this boom was characterized by short-term Treasury bills. However, over time, several middle-income economies have successfully developed functioning local bond markets, featuring regular issuance calendars and longer maturity profiles.
💡 This shift signifies a major structural change. Borrowing in domestic currency reduces exposure to exchange-rate depreciation and the original sin of dollar-denominated liabilities. However, it also internalizes risk, concentrating sovereign exposure within local financial institutions. As domestic banks and pension funds now hold a substantial portion of government securities, they are becoming increasingly intertwined with fiscal dynamics—a classic sovereign-bank nexus that warrants close observation.
2. Divergent Borrowing Costs
The dataset offers the first continent-wide comparison of interest rates across all debt instruments. Multilateral loans continue to be the most affordable financing option, averaging below 1%, followed by bilateral official lending. In stark contrast, domestic bonds and bills are the most expensive, carrying average nominal yields of 10–13%.
✅ When adjusted for inflation, however, many of these domestic instruments yield negative real returns. The variation across countries is remarkable. Nations like Tanzania and Mauritius issue debt at modest real rates, whereas Nigeria and Egypt have experienced real yields fluctuating between –30% and +10%. Several factors contribute to this divergence, including varying degrees of financial repression, differences in monetary credibility, and structural limitations in shallow domestic markets. This presents a new avenue for research into how inflation expectations, capital controls, and domestic savings constraints influence sovereign borrowing costs in low-income economies.
3. Maturities All Over the Map
The maturity structure of African debt is highly uneven. South Africa and Egypt, for instance, issue domestic bonds with ten- to fifteen-year maturities, maintaining relatively deep yield curves. Countries such as Tanzania, Uganda, and Mauritius are gradually extending their maturities, supported by improved macroeconomic stability and institutional reforms.
📍 Conversely, countries like Ghana and Mozambique are caught in a cycle of short-term borrowing, limiting their fiscal flexibility.
4. Refinancing Risks Rising
The new dataset also provides a granular view of repayment profiles. Debt-service obligations are projected to surpass $100 billion in 2026 and remain above $60 billion annually through 2030. The majority of these payments stem from bonds, both domestic and international, which typically carry higher costs and shorter maturities compared to concessional loans.
📊 Countries with significant Eurobond exposure face particularly steep repayment cliffs. Even those that have avoided default dedicate between 20% and 40% of their fiscal revenue to debt servicing. As access to external markets tightens, many governments are resorting to domestic issuance to roll over maturing liabilities. This creates a self-reinforcing debt treadmill, where short-term obligations are financed by even shorter-term instruments.
⚡ This dynamic underscores a growing vulnerability. Without deeper domestic markets or renewed access to concessional finance, refinancing risks could rapidly escalate into liquidity crises, especially if domestically issued debt is held by foreign investors. For international financial institutions, the challenge lies in supporting transparent local-currency market development while concurrently mitigating the buildup of rollover and interest rate risks.
Policy Implications and the Road Ahead
Taken together, these findings signify a historic shift in Africa’s debt landscape.
On the positive side, the expansion of domestic debt markets holds the potential to deepen financial systems, cultivate local investor bases, and enhance monetary autonomy. Governments capable of borrowing in their own currency are less susceptible to exchange-rate crises and may gain greater control over fiscal policy.
However, the risks are equally pronounced. Large domestic debt stocks can crowd out private credit, intensify the links between sovereign and banking sector stability, and fuel incentives for inflationary finance when fiscal pressures mount. The distinction between financial deepening and financial repression can be quite narrow.
📌 A second, crucial lesson from the ADD is that transparency is achievable. Despite limited funding and no institutional backing, a small academic team successfully compiled a detailed, verifiable record of Africa’s debt instruments by combining public data sources with modern digital tools. If such an effort can succeed on a shoestring budget, the potential for well-resourced international institutions to replicate and scale this is considerable.
Better data are not merely a research tool; they are fundamental for effective policymaking. As Africa’s borrowing landscape continues to evolve, credible, granular, and timely information will be indispensable for designing debt-sustainability frameworks, fostering domestic markets, and coordinating efforts among creditors.
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