Balance-Sheet Africa
What a country owes and to whom, what came in this year, and what falls due next: sources and uses of funds for one African state, or for the fifty-four summed. The continental view adds up only the cards that carry a field, and prints the count beside every total, so a number built from fifty cards never passes for one built from fifty-four.
Two cuts, not one pie. Multilateral, official bilateral and private divide publicly guaranteed debt by the kind of institution that lent, and they add up to it exactly, with bonds the bond part of the private line and drawn inside it rather than beside it. The Paris Club and China lines divide the same total by the country the creditor is resident in, and a lender’s country says nothing about whether the statistics count it as official or private. Those two run across all three bars above them and are never added to them. A reader who sums all five gets more creditors than there is debt.
Why there is no Sankey. The obvious picture for sources and uses is a flow diagram, and this page deliberately does not draw one. A Sankey’s ribbons assert that a particular source paid for a particular use, and nothing on the country cards says which dollar of remittances met which dollar of debt service. The remittance bar is a household inflow. It is not a subscription to a corridor, a PIDA project or any other infrastructure claim; Chapter 10 and Chapter 19 keep that distinction. Bars on a shared scale say exactly what the sources support: how large each quantity is beside the others. They stop there.
A blank is a blank. Where a series does not exist for a country the page says so in words: no private line in the statistics, no remittance series for this country, not recorded, which is not the same as none. Nothing is estimated, interpolated, or set to zero because the number is missing, and a missing value is absent from every total rather than counted as nothing.
Open the balance sheet in its own tab, worth doing on a small screen, where the whole viewport goes to the bars instead of a frame inside a page.
Open the continent first and read the count beside each total before reading the dollars. The external debt stock is built from fifty cards, the private-creditor line from forty-three and the bond line from twenty-three; the flow lines are built from forty-eight, fifty-four and fifty-four. Then ask what a continental balance sheet means when its lines are assembled from different subsets of the same fifty-four countries.
- Switch to percent of output and pick Mozambique, then Algeria. One has an external debt stock of several times a year’s production and the other of a few percent. Say which of the two you would rather be the finance minister of, and what on this page would change your mind.
- Put South Africa on the screen and look at the direct-investment bar, which is drawn to the left of the zero line. Say what a negative net inflow is a measurement of, and why it is not a gap in the data.
The page reads one record per country, taken from the same fifty-four country cards, so a bar here and a figure on a card cannot disagree. Which release each number comes from is set out on the About the data page.
All 54 country cards · Sovereign Debt Tracker · Compare cards · Field notes: UNGA Week 2026 · About the data