According to research published by UNESCO, 113 developing countries allocated more fiscal resources to servicing foreign debt than to education in 2025, a predicamentpredicament/prɪˈdɪk.ə.mənt/L3困境，窘境a difficult, unpleasant, or embarrassing situation in which one does not know what to do that threatens to entrenchentrench/ɪnˈtrentʃ/L3使根深蒂固；牢固确立（通常指不良状态或观念）to establish something (such as a custom, belief, or system) so firmly that it is very difficult to change long-term developmental stagnation. In sub-Saharan Africa, the disparitydisparity/dɪˈspær.ɪ.ti/L3悬殊，差异（尤指不公平的）a great difference between two or more things, especially an unfair one was particularly acute: governments spent, on average, 3.6 times more on debt repayment than on schooling. That such prioritisation persists concurrently with a projected 30% decline in global aid to education by 2027 underscores a systemic crisis rather than a mere cyclical downturn.
The situation, warned the agency, is likely to be exacerbated by funding cuts that have already stripped low- and lower-middle-income countries of 21% of the educational aid they received in 2023, with some nations—including Afghanistan, Mali, Niger, and Liberia—having lost more than 40% over three years. Min Jeong Kim, director of UNESCO’s education division, argued that current approaches “keep the countries trapped in a cycle of austerityausterity/ɔːˈster.ɪ.ti/L3经济紧缩，紧缩政策；艰苦，朴素a situation in which people or governments have to live with reduced spending and strict economic controls, often due to a financial crisis, underinvestment, and stalled development,” thereby weakening their economic growth potential, eroding domestic revenue mobilisation, and ultimately diminishing their capacity to manage debt over time. Indeed, eighteen of the most indebted countries spent five times more on debt than on education; for Sri Lanka, the ratio reached a staggering 16:1.
Compounding this fiscal squeeze, Debt Justice—a UK-based campaign group—reported that poorer countries’ debt repayments hit a 35-year high last year, with 56 nations spending nearly a fifth of their total revenue on servicing loans. Tim Jones, the organisation’s policy director, attributed this ballooning to “a series of shocks from Covid, energy price and interest rate rises and climate disasters,” which, in the worst-affected states, have precipitated cuts to essential services like health and education. The crisis has been aggravated by aid reductions from the US and Europe, where funding to education dropped by $600 million in 2024 and is expected to have fallen further in 2025, leading to widespread disruption: schools lack sufficient operational funds, and teachers frequently go unpaid.
In the long term, weakened education systems imperil indebted countries’ capacity to develop their economies and equip themselves to handle future debt burdens, creating a vicious circle of underinvestment and stagnation. UNESCO has therefore called for a fundamental restructuring of debt relief, shifting from short-term palliatives to long-term arrangements that allow sustained funding for public services. Jones further argued that private lenders—often domiciled in Britain and the US—must be prevented from blocking agreements to extract additional profit, as they recently did with Ethiopia. He urged the UK to use its 2027 G20 presidency to enact major changes to the debt-relief process, including more cancellation and faster procedures, central to which would be incorporating the process into English law so that private creditors can no longer disrupt or hold out from relief efforts.
