Background to the African Debt Crisis

1.01 The debt crisis, or perhaps more accurately, debt cancer 1 that has spread across Africa in the last decade, needs little introduction. Much has already been said about the causes, consequences and costs economic, social, human and ecological of that affliction and about the structural adjustment and economic reform measures which have been taken to cope with it on a continental scale. The reasons which gave rise to excessive African indebtedness in the 1970s and early 1980s, and which caused it to balloon from $140 billion when the crisis emerged in 1982 to over $270 billion in 1990, have been amply documented elsewhere. It would be redundant to go into them at length again here.