In politics, broken promises fuel citizens’ distrust of their leaders. In terms of international solidarity, they are the breeding ground for the resentment of poor countries towards the great powers. However, in any case, there is no inevitability for public action to boil down to a litany of renunciations.

Almost a year after the announcement by rich countries of financial support to vulnerable countries equivalent to 100 billion dollars to deal with the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic, only 60 billion have actually been promised to this day by the rich countries, and a very small part of this sum has actually been paid to the beneficiary countries, who are rightly impatient, because the challenges they have to meet have never been greater.

What are we talking about exactly? To fund health and economic responses to the pandemic, the IMF decided on August 23, 2021 to make a new general allocation of special drawing rights (SDRs) equivalent to 650 billion dollars and distributed among its 190 member countries according to their weight in the world economy. SDRs are international reserve assets that can be exchanged by recipient countries for foreign currency, without creating additional debt. However, high-income countries did not really need this mechanism to deal with the pandemic, because they had fiscal and monetary leeway as well as sufficient borrowing capacity to cushion the crisis. impact of the crisis. Hence the proposal, formulated at the Summit on the financing of African economies in Paris, and taken up by the G7 in Carbis Bay and then the G20 in Rome, to ask the rich countries to ” to recycle “ a share of their unused SDRs in favor of the countries that need it the most, in particular African countries.

Africa on the brink

However, it was up to the richest countries to decide, on a voluntary basis, the share of their SDRs that they wished to reallocate in this way. While some, such as France, Canada, the United Kingdom, or Italy, have played the game by announcing that they will redirect 20% of their SDRs to African economies, others have remained silent on their level of commitment. The United States, for example, has not yet materialized its desire to in turn reallocate 20% of its SDRs. Result: 40% of the 100 billion dollars announced by the G20 are still missing today.

Worse: almost no disbursement of the sums promised has yet taken place. Technical solutions enabling rich countries to recycle their SDRs without affecting the balance sheets of their central banks, which have integrated them into their foreign exchange reserves, are indeed still debated; and in fact, this financial assistance could take many forms, including loans.

Yet Africa is on the brink. Crises are piling up and the financing needs of African economies have never been so urgent. The continent has still not recovered from the shock of the health crisis: while the leaders of the G7 countries announce that they have now chosen to “living with the virus”, 97 million people worldwide have been pushed into extreme poverty by the pandemic. The persistence of armed conflicts and security risks on the African continent are increasing humanitarian needs there. The consequences of the climate crisis, droughts and floods, increase the risks of food crisis, and the dependence on agricultural imports Russians and Ukrainians today blocked by the war entails soaring food prices.

The commitment of the rich countries must be kept

In April 2022, 335 million Africans suffered from hunger. 28 million people are at risk of facing famine in East Africa. In this context, 27 emerging countries – including 10 in Africa – are currently encountering major difficulties in borrowing on the financial markets. And 23 African countries are currently in debt distress or at high risk of debt distress. It would be paradoxical for the promised external financial aid to run out at the precise moment when it is more essential than ever. And unacceptable that it contributes once again to increasing the burden of debt service repayment, to the detriment of financing economic and social development and the resilience of low-income countries in the face of global shocks.

It is therefore no longer time to procrastinate. The commitment to pay 100 billion to the most vulnerable countries by recycling rich countries’ SDRs must be kept, in particular through support for multilateral development banks.

The difference between the effect of communication during a summit of Heads of State and the reality of an international solidarity policy is the constancy of commitments and the monitoring of their implementation. Recycling SDRs to keep fragile economies afloat is just the latest example of broken promises to African countries. While in recent months Africa has legitimately felt left out of the global vaccine campaign against the pandemic, France must not allow the consensus it has helped to create within the international community in favor of financial support for the African continent.

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Our country must work with all the G20 countries so that they respect their aid commitments to Africa. The President of the Republic must also place this issue at the heart of the French presidency of the European Union which ends at the end of the month. To do this, France must find at least $15 billion in additional SDRs with its European partners, starting by increasing its own commitment to reach 30% reallocation, before handing over the reins of the presidency of the Council of the European Union to the Czech Republic. For as long as its unreliability lasts, Europe’s influence will continue to decline in this region of the world, especially among its youth.