The Jubilee Year in 2025 is a significant opportunity for debt relief and forgiveness. Pope Francis has emphasized that this Jubilee Year could serve as a chance for compassionate debt relief for poor nations grappling with debts. Proclaiming Jubilee 2025, the pope appealed to the world’s wealthiest nations “to forgive the debts of countries that will never be able to repay them.”
The Catholic Church celebrates a Jubilee Year every 25 years, a practice with roots in the ancient Jewish tradition of the Jubilee when slaves were freed and debts forgiven. The Jubilee Year is an important period dedicated to forgiveness and reconciliation.
In view of this Church’s initiative, religious leaders from Africa recently gathered to prepare the Jubilee Year 2025 as an ecumenical event. Their main proposal was to appeal to the UN, the G7, the G20, the IMF, and the World Bank for the forgiveness of African countries’ debts to alleviate their financial burdens.
Debt forgiveness for Africa refers to the cancellation or reduction of debts owed by African countries to external creditors. The main reason is the desire to alleviate poverty and ensure that these countries can invest more in essential services like healthcare, education, and infrastructure instead of servicing debt.
Africa is expected to spend $90 billion this year on servicing public debt, while the average African country’s total expenditure on health, education, and social protection amounts to only two-thirds of its debt payments. This leaves governments in a dilemma between paying off their debts and investing in people’s well-being.
The faith leaders cite the ongoing struggles faced by millions across Africa, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, vulnerabilities, wars, fragile health systems, climate change, and a soaring cost of living. These crises have not only reversed decades of progress but also increased poverty levels. Growing food insecurity exacerbates conflicts and social tensions, making governance more fragile.
The current initiative is akin to the appeal in the last Jubilee Year in 2000, which released $130 billion in debt relief that helped reduce poverty in several countries. Unfortunately, imbalances in the tax, trading, and financial systems and weaknesses in national governance continued to contribute to the growing debt.
Therefore, the faith leaders urge creditors to align their actions and decisions in the coming months with the Jubilee values “that put people and the Earth above debt.”
