Here is the number that best captures where Sub-Saharan Africa stands on debt in mid-2026: governments across the region are now spending 18.7% of budget revenues on servicing external public debt — three times the level in 2014, and nearly double the 12% threshold the IMF considers a warning sign. That figure comes from a July 2025 UN Secretary-General report on external debt sustainability. It is not a projection. It is what is already happening.
The continent-wide external debt stock has crossed $1 trillion, according to UNDP data published in August 2025 — roughly double the $500 billion recorded in 2020. But the absolute number is less important than where the debt is concentrated and, above all, what it costs. This is the structural shift that defines African public finance in 2026: the debt itself has stabilized, but the cost of servicing it keeps climbing, squeezing out the investments that might eventually make it sustainable.
Who actually owes what
Before applying these numbers to Central Africa, the geography matters. Africa's external debt is heavily concentrated among its largest economies. According to Afreximbank's 2024 debt report, 67% of the continent's total external debt stock is held by just ten countries — Egypt, South Africa, Nigeria, Morocco, Mozambique, Kenya, Tunisia, Sudan, Ghana, and Angola. Angola, at 5.3% of the continental total, is the only Central African country in that group.
The rest of the region — Cameroon, the DRC, Chad, the Republic of Congo, CAR, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon — carries relatively modest external debt in absolute terms. But "modest" is relative. In a region where fiscal revenues are thin, commodity-dependent, and structurally volatile, even manageable-sounding debt ratios produce crippling servicing costs. The CEMAC zone — the six-country monetary union covering Cameroon, Gabon, Chad, CAR, Republic of Congo, and Equatorial Guinea — carries a combined public debt ratio of 52.6% of GDP as of end-2024, according to the IMF's May 2026 CEMAC Regional Economic Outlook. That is broadly stable but comes with a critical caveat: government bond yields in Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, and Gabon reached between 7 and 10% in 2024, and failed debt auctions — rare before 2023 — are becoming increasingly common across the region.
Country by country: what the numbers mean on the ground
Cameroon, the CEMAC zone's largest economy, had its public debt at 43% of GDP in mid-2025 — formally below the CEMAC's 70% ceiling. But both the IMF and the AfDB classify Cameroon as high risk of debt distress, not because of the ratio itself but because of liquidity risks and a saturated domestic debt market. The government needed to raise $1.7 billion in 2025 and arranged a private placement at a 9.45% effective interest rate in December 2025. Debt service obligations are projected to peak at around 2.8% of revenues in 2026-27 — and that is before accounting for the structural pressures from the Anglophone crisis and Far North security spending. The IMF's March 2026 country report is blunt: "ad hoc external borrowing at commercial terms should be replaced by a credible, multi-year strategy."
Chad is the most acute case in the CEMAC zone. Despite its debt being formally rerated from high to moderate distress following recent restructuring, the IMF's August 2025 DSA applies a judgment override, maintaining the high risk assessment due to the volatility surrounding baseline projections. Chad currently carries arrears to Libya, the Republic of Congo, Cameroon, and a commercial bank. It is negotiating a new four-year ECF arrangement with the IMF precisely because its debt trajectory — dependent on oil revenues that are declining and volatile — cannot be stabilized without external support.
The DRC sits outside the CEMAC zone and operates under a different monetary architecture, but its debt dynamics are equally telling. The IMF completed its third ECF review in June 2026, unlocking $258 million in disbursements as part of a total $1 billion program. The picture is mixed: GDP growth exceeded 5.5% in both 2025 and 2026, driven by mining, and inflation has stayed below 2.5%. But the DRC's domestic fiscal deficit exceeded its ceiling at end-2025 by 0.6 percentage points of GDP, driven by security spending related to the M23 conflict — precisely the kind of shock that turns manageable debt into distress.
The cost that compounds everything
The hardest thing to capture in aggregate debt statistics is what these servicing costs actually displace. ONE Data's April 2026 analysis — drawing on World Bank IDS data — documents that across Africa, 28 countries spend more on external debt service than on healthcare, and 10 countries spend more on debt service than on education. These are continental figures, but the Central African countries at highest risk of debt distress are disproportionately represented in both categories.
CEMAC debt repayments scheduled for 2026 rose from CFAF 1,963 billion to CFAF 2,290 billion — a 17% increase — and are set to climb further in 2027. In a region where healthcare systems are managing an active Ebola outbreak, where 2.9 million Cameroonians face food crisis conditions, and where the DRC is running military operations on two separate fronts, those are not abstract fiscal numbers. They are the direct cost of debt crowding out the spending that a functional state requires.
The composition problem
The shift in who holds African debt is as important as the total. Before 2000, the majority of African external debt was owed to official creditors — Paris Club members and multilateral lenders who could reschedule, restructure, or forgive. Now, as ONE Data confirmed in its April 2026 update, 42% of African external debt is owed to private creditors, who do not restructure easily, do not reschedule bilaterally, and price in risk through interest rates rather than absorbing it through concessionality. China, the dominant bilateral creditor of the previous decade, has sharply reduced new lending since 2022 — AidData puts the decline from a peak of $28 billion annually to under $5 billion — leaving a gap that commercial markets have partially filled at significantly higher rates.
The IMF's March 2026 Finance & Development article on "The New Face of African Debt" captures the resulting dynamic: overall debt has stabilized, "but the cost of servicing this debt has continued to climb, squeezing government budgets and leaving less room for vital investments in health, education, and infrastructure." For Central Africa's governments, managing this squeeze while simultaneously funding security operations, development corridors, and post-conflict stabilization is not a policy choice. It is the permanent condition in which they operate. The debt is not the biggest problem. The cost of the debt — and what that cost prevents — is.
