Civil-society oversight is the cheapest insurance in sovereign finance, because it enables independent scrutiny long before a default. But given that a borrowing government will never volunteer to fund the people who audit it, global decision-makers must do so using agreements for stolen-asset recovery and sovereign-debt treatments.
HARARE—In 2021, Zimbabwean Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube caused an uproar when he issued more than $15 million in guarantees for private loans made by the Commercial Bank of Zimbabwe without seeking parliament’s approval. It was a particularly flagrant example of an unfortunately common practice in Zimbabwe: committing state resources to non-essential projects that offer no public benefit. Some of these loans invariably went unpaid, leaving taxpayers to cover the losses.
In April 2022, the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development (which I led at the time), together with three co-applicants, petitioned the High Court of Zimbabwe to declare that parliament must approve public borrowing before it happens. In March 2023, the Court ordered the government to gazette a bill in the next 12 months outlining parliament’s role in approving loans and guarantees and establishing the procedure for ratification or rejection.
This win was possible only because of a grant. The Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, a regional foundation, funded the external lawyers who argued it, as well as our researchers, on a three-year cycle. When the cycle ended, the capacity to fight these legal battles went with it.
This model of financing public accountability in developing countries through grants has started to collapse. Aid from OECD donors fell by 23.1% in real terms in 2025, the largest annual drop ever recorded. Meanwhile, governments are tightening the requirements for registering civil-society organizations and limiting which of these groups can receive funding from abroad. Zimbabwe’s Private Voluntary Organisations Amendment Act, enacted in April 2025, allows the authorities to cancel the registration of civil-society organizations and seize their assets without judicial oversight. El Salvador’s Foreign Agents Law, passed just one month later, imposed a 30% tax on all foreign funding.
The weakening of civil-society participation will be felt widely, not least because every proposal for making global finance more sustainable and equitable depends on citizens who can read a debt-sustainability analysis and force a minister to answer for it. The Sevilla Commitment, adopted at last year’s Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development, calls for strengthening parliamentary oversight of debt, independent audit institutions, and civil society’s role in exposing illicit financial flows. But nobody has said who pays for that work.
The answer may lie in two types of international instruments: agreements for stolen-asset recovery and sovereign-debt treatments. Each could contain a clause mandating that a fixed share of the sum—5% is a justifiable starting point—goes toward funding independent oversight of public finance in the recipient country. The money would be protected from executive interference, publicly audited, and guaranteed for the life of the program.
This has already been done in agreements for asset returns. In December 2017, Switzerland repatriated roughly $321 million stolen by former Nigerian President Sani Abacha under an agreement that provided for World Bank monitoring and civil-society oversight of how the money was spent. That same year, the United Kingdom, the United States, and four focus countries—Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, and Ukraine—adopted the GFAR (Global Forum on Asset Recovery) principles, which commit governments that are returning or receiving assets to transparency and accountability.
But, to date, such monitoring has been treated as a courtesy, extended at the discretion of the government that happens to be holding the stolen funds. The Sevilla Commitment calls for piloting new approaches to asset return, including a clause in these agreements stipulating that a third party monitors the disbursement of money for oversight to prevent tampering from the recipient government.
Debt treatments, negotiated in creditor committees and multilateral fora, could adopt a similar approach: channel a fixed share of debt-service savings to an independently governed fund that supports public-finance oversight. Grants would be awarded competitively, published in a database, and externally audited against criteria written into the settlement.
Creditors have already accepted similar terms for different categories. In 1998, Uganda ring-fenced its debt-relief savings under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, earmarking them for anti-poverty programs. In 2023, Ecuador completed a debt-for-nature swap in which part of the interest on the new loan pays roughly $12 million annually, for 18.5 years, into a fund for maintaining the Galápagos Islands, governed by a board of representatives from government, academia, and business.
A borrowing government will never volunteer to fund the people who audit it. But when the obligation is written into these settlements, the money survives the next budget or election. It also gives creditors insight into the borrower’s disclosure practices.
Oversight is the cheapest insurance in sovereign finance. A group of economists tracking revelations of undisclosed debt across 154 countries over the past century found that nearly half of all sovereign defaults coincided with substantial upward revisions to reported public debt. Hidden debt piles up in good times and surfaces in bad times, when someone finally examines the books. If public oversight is properly funded, outside scrutiny begins long before a default and can pave the way for reform.
Consider the order that we won from Zimbabwe’s High Court. It was an important outcome that nonetheless failed to dent the problem. A bill was drafted but not gazetted; the Court’s deadline passed with no action. The organizations that could have fought in the courts for its enforcement had moved on to other grant-funded work.
As efforts to revamp the global financial architecture accelerate, policymakers must recognize that improving debt management starts with accountability at home. At the International Monetary Fund-World Bank Annual Meetings in October, the new Borrowers’ Platform, which seeks to give developing countries a stronger voice in global debt discussions, held its first Governing Council. While proactive coordination between finance ministers and central-bank governors, as the officials who sign the loans, is essential to achieve sustainable debt levels, it must be coupled with long-term external funding for civil-society groups that can hold them to their word.
