Gender and debt

Lower-income countries have been facing increasingly unsustainable debts since the 2008 financial crisis, exacerbated by the pandemic: debt payments have increased by over 200% between 2010 and 2024, reaching their highest level since the mid-1990s. As a result, resources needed to provide healthcare and education and respond to energy and food price rises are increasingly being diverted to debt repayments. Thirty-two African countries now spend more on paying external debts than they do on healthcare.

Countries in debt crisis can no longer borrow from the private finance markets whose high interest lending generated the debt crisis in the first place. As a result, in order to keep paying the banks and bondholders, they turn to the IMF for loans. 

The condition of those loans is austerity. From Sri Lanka to Suriname, cuts have had a deep impact on people’s lives, as healthcare collapses, schools shut down, and workers lose their jobs.

This generates a crisis of care, with a deeply gendered impact. Looking after children, older people and sick people, which was once the collective responsibility of the community, more or less supplemented by public services, is increasingly financialized, as all pay for services and richer families subcontract care to poorer women. Cuts and privatization of public services shift the burden of care onto unpaid carers: primarily women and LGBTQ+ people. 

In addition, like other workers, carers have to work longer hours, in more precarious conditions, for lower salaries, in order to pay for ever more expensive essentials. 

When someone falls sick, or has an accident, or loses their job, the sudden costs or loss of income can be disastrous. Carers are forced more deeply into debt to pay for the essentials of daily life, as the cycle of debt moves from the state to the household level. At the same time, they have less and less time and resources to provide the unpaid care that cuts in services increasingly load onto them, and that society depends on.

The crisis of care is now a global phenomenon, as communities in the global north face similar processes of extraction to their counterparts in the south, in stagnant economies dependent on skyrocketing household debt for their minimal growth and healthy corporate profits. In the global north as in the south, feminized workers are increasingly exploited in unpaid care and low-paid precarious wage labour. Nancy Fraser has set out how, by pushing to the edge the unpaid carers on which it depends, as well as wrecking the ‘nature’ which it pillages for free resources and undermining the liberal democracy that protects its property rights, global financial capitalism is increasingly cannibalising the conditions of its own profits, triggering multiple intersecting crises that threaten both the capitalist system and life on earth.

As Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago have explained, the novelty of debt-driven exploitation is that it enforces obedience at the same time as it generates profits. The very same tool that drains resources from communities into corporate profits simultaneously works to make that extraction invisible, individual and shameful, in stark contrast to the collective exploitation of workers on the factory floor. Whereas unionised workers have strength in numbers for their collective struggle against identifiable exploitative employers, the individual is alone with their debts before the invisible ranks of banks and creditors – and is told by society that it is their fault. Similarly, states are alone against their creditors and the IMF, in fear of the judgments of credit ratings agencies, and stigmatised by a moralising (and often implicitly racist) narrative that debts are the result of irresponsible borrowing, wastefulness and corruption.

Cavallero and Gago call for a resistance that would oppose the abstractions of financialization by making debt collective and embodied. Their call for “Taking [debt] out of the closet means making it visible and situating it as a common problem, de-individualizing it… challenging its power to shame and… function as a “private issue”, which we can only face by managing our accounts alone.” These forms of resistance, across indebted communities in global north and south, can heed Silvia Federici’s call to “not only protest the debt but recreate and reinvent the commons the debt has destroyed.”