The human cost of debt

After much publicized debt relief, debt service in Mali was $88 million in 2000. This is greater than the level of government spending on health ($54 million in 1998), in a country where one in four children do not live to see their fifth birthday, and where per capita spending on health is $5 as compared to the World Bank's recommended level for basic health care of $12.

Who pays who?

Every day in 1999 $128 million was transferred from the poorest countries to the richest in debt repayments. Of this, $53 million was from East Asia and the Pacific, $38 million from South Asia and $23 million from Africa.

How much would debt cancellation cost?

Spread over 20 years, the cost of cancelling the debts of 52 countries is less than $4 a month for each person in the industrialised world.

13 of the 26 countries receiving debt relief are still spending more on debt than on public health. For example, Zambia has almost one million people affected by HIV/AIDS, but is spending 30% more on debt servicing than on health.

Developing countries often end up paying much more back than they originally borrowed. Costa Rica borrowed less than £4 million from Britain in 1973. By 1999 it had paid Britain more than £7 million of that loan but still owed more than £1 million.

If debt had been cancelled in 1997 for twenty of the poorest countries, the money released for basic health care could have saved the lives of about 21 million children by the year 2000, the equivalent of 19,000 children a day.