Politics of Debt Success in Africa and Feminist Political Economy Perspectives in Zambia

This article advances a feminist rethinking of what constitutes “success” in debt politics in Africa, foregrounding gender and justice. Focusing on Zambia, it interrogates the assumptions underpinning debt sustainability processes, drawing on official debt documents, media coverage of government negotiations (n=10), and in-depth interviews with debt justice advocates (n=14). The article shows that dominant political definitions of success prioritize fiscal discipline, structural benchmarks, and public financial management, while sidelining investment in social sectors. This narrow technocratic framing that privileges debt sustainability preferences obscures the gendered consequences of debt and austerity. Creditor-driven negotiations routinely legitimate austerity measures without accounting for their disproportionate burdens on women, intensifying pressures across paid and unpaid labor. Largely absent from public debate, these dynamics reveal how debt governance reproduces everyday inequalities. The article proposes gender-sensitive indicators that could be integrated into debt sustainability assessments to better reflect the lived realities of women and men.HIGHLIGHTS Debt metrics prioritize fiscal discipline, sidelining social sector investment.Creditor-led negotiations normalize austerity, ignoring women’s unpaid work.Debt sustainability must include gender-responsive indicators.Post-crisis agendas focus on investors, marginalizing women’s priorities.Debt success assumptions reveal limits of social consideration in governance.