Sovereign Debt Tracker
Who African governments owe, how much of it falls due in the next five years, and what the official statistics do and do not tell you about the Chinese share. Pick a country for the creditor breakdown, or switch to the China view for all fifty-four ranked side by side.
Two numbers sit next to each other here and they are not the same quantity. The International Debt Statistics carry a China line and a Paris Club line, but they cut publicly guaranteed debt by the creditor’s country and not by its type, so they sit across the multilateral, bilateral and private columns rather than inside any one of them, and must never be added to them. The Boston University loan-level database records commitments signed between 2000 and 2024, which is not a debt stock at all: some of it was never drawn, some has been repaid, some was rescheduled. The distance between the two is the thing worth studying, and this page is built to keep it visible rather than to close it.
A blank is a blank. Where a series has not been fetched the page says so in words and draws a hatched block that carries no width. Nothing here is estimated, interpolated, or set to zero because the number is missing.
Open the tracker in its own tab, worth doing on a small screen, and the CSV download works there even where an embedded frame blocks it.
The tracker 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.