By Rebeca Grynspan
The writer is the Secretary-General of UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The following are extensive excerpts from her Statement to 14th session of the three-day International Debt Management Conference on 17 March 2025.
GENEVA, Switzerland | 21 March 2025 (IDN) — The Romans had a god named Janus—the deity of thresholds, beginnings, and transitions, famously depicted with two faces, one looking back, the other forward. Debt management demands that same duality. Like that ancient god, we too must look in two directions at once: backward at the debts we’ve accumulated, and forward to the futures they will shape.
That dual gaze has never been more critical. We meet today in the middle of a debt and development crisis. Debts that should be propelling countries’ development are instead forcing them to default on it. How we deal with that challenge, how we manage it with vision and innovation, is the central purpose of this conference.
I would like to focus on three points: First, why debt management matters. Second, why it matters today. And third, what are our expectations for this meeting?
The rationale behind debt management
At its core, debt management is about time. When we borrow, we are essentially having a conversation across time—drawing resources from our future selves to meet the urgencies of today. This temporal dimension has profound moral and practical implications. The decisions we make today about how much to borrow, for what purposes, and on what terms echo through generations.
Good debt management is therefore fundamentally about stewardship—the oversight of resources that do not fully belong to us. It is about ensuring that when we borrow, we do so to build something of value, something that eventually creates the means of its repayment.
So, let´s say this very strongly: transparency, no corruption, good management and national priorities allocations are key.
But, in today’s world, it is becoming very hard to be a good steward even when you do the right thing because debt vulnerability is not just a function of domestic policy or of misbehavior. A country can do everything right and still find itself thrust into debt distress by external shocks as we have seen with COVID, climate change, trade disruptions, and the effect of a massive hike in interest rates. All of them are outside of individual countries’ control.
Our global financial architecture imposes high capital costs on developing countries that experience chronic under-investment issues, and we are still short of a universal safety net that will shield countries from external shocks and a multilateral financial system that can provide affordable long-term resources at scale crowding in private investment.
Debt management today
Our data shows that 3.3 billion people live in countries that spend more on debt servicing than on either health or education. Interest payments outweigh climate investments in almost all developing countries
Over the past six years, more than two-thirds of the world’s developing countries have experienced deterioration in their external debt sustainability. In 2023, the average developing country was spending 16% of their export earnings to service their debt, more than three times the 5 percent limit set for Germany’s post-war reconstruction under the 1953 London Agreement.
Numbers like these, counted in the trillions of dollars and the billions of people, should once and for all take us beyond the blame game.
Furthermore, even as debt challenges have grown in complexity and scale, our multilateral tools have failed to adapt to address them.
The Common Framework and the IMF roundtables are steps in the right direction but have proven too slow, too complex, and too limited in scope. Zambia waited for four years to get its restructuring done. Ghana case was slightly faster. Ethiopia is still waiting. All of this is too slow. Debt crises are always acute; waiting for years is like going to the hospital with a heart attack to be told by the doctor that he will see you tomorrow. Sometimes, solving a problem late is the same as not solving it at all.
Improvements have been proposed but not agreed, for example, on an interest standstill while negotiations go on. Also, in the Pact for the future there is a call on the IMF to initiate a process to revise the debt architecture. This could be a good start to establishing a clear, stable, and predictable mechanism.
One reason of the additional complexity of the debt restructuring is the changing creditor landscape. Almost two-thirds of developing countries’ debt is now owned by private creditors who operate with different incentives than traditional bilateral donors creditors.
In the current system, some private bondholders have become de facto senior creditors, standing above multilateral and official lenders, some ready to litigate aggressively.
Why the debt management conference
Meanwhile, as I said before, there is no standstill mechanism while negotiations drag on, countries are unable to access capital markets or roll over debts. This forces countries to choose to default on their development to not default on their debt. No more defaults on debt but yes on development.
This combination of challenges but small or incomplete solutions has produced deep inequities.
So, just three months ahead of the FFD4 in Seville, this conference will seek to provide concrete, practical answers to this challenge.
Over the next three days, our nine panels will tackle everything from navigating debt geopolitics to exploring the debt-climate nexus, to enhancing governance and transparency. We’ll examine legal tools for consensus building, innovative debt instruments, and institutional capacity challenges. Each session brings together diverse perspectives—from policymakers who face these challenges daily to experts who study systemic solutions.
But what makes this conference unique is its practical orientation. We’re not just here to diagnose problems but to share concrete tools, strategies, experiences, and innovations that can be implemented in real-world settings. This is why I’m particularly proud to announce a significant milestone for UNCTAD’s debt work.
Today, we are launching the next generation of our Debt Management & Financial Analysis System—DMFAS 7. For more than 45 years, DMFAS has supported over 61 countries in public debt management, transparency, and good governance. This new version represents a big leap forward. It aligns with current technologies and office requirements, particularly in terms of coverage and reporting. This system is far more intuitive, easier to navigate and better integrated with other financial systems.
When I was in government in Costa Rica, I was part of the negotiating team with many stand-by arrangements with the IMF. That experience taught me how critical debt management tools are. Before you can even begin negotiations, you need precise answers to key questions: What debts do we have? With whom? When do they mature? At what interest?
Without these answers—without accurate, easy-to-navigate, debt data—you cannot make informed decisions. You cannot negotiate rightly, and effectively with creditors. You cannot make strategic choices. All you can do is react to the constraints of the fast-paced, high-stress, high-stakes environments that characterize debt negotiations. This is why DMFAS is not just software. It is an instrument of economic sovereignty.
I want to close by returning to the image of Janus, the Roman god with the two faces. Janus stood at the threshold of temples, guarding the passage between what was and what could be. Today, we stand at a similar threshold. Behind us lies a system that needs reform; before us, the chance to build one that serves people and stability, not speculation; long-term development, not recurring default. [IDN-InDepthNews]
Image: UNCTAD Secretary-General Rebeca Grynspan opens the 14th International Debt Management Conference. Source: UNCTAD
