Developing nations have long been the supplicants of global finance, hat in hand before creditors who set the terms. A new initiative, the Borrowers’ Platform, launched on April 15th on the margins of the IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings in Washington, aims to change that. Backed by UNCTAD and proposed by a UN expert group in 2025, the platform will let borrower governments pool knowledge, coordinate positions and negotiate with creditors on something closer to equal terms.

The timing is pointed. The Middle East conflict is sending shockwaves far beyond the region, pushing up fuel and food costs from the Caribbean to the Pacific. UN analysts warn that more than 30 million people could be tipped into poverty as a result. For countries already struggling under debt, the additional pressure is acute. Least developed nations now spend nearly a quarter of their revenues servicing external creditors. Across 54 countries, home to 3.4 billion people, debt repayments exceed spending on health or education combined. By 2024, the collective external debt of developing nations had reached $11.7 trillion.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres, speaking at the launch, called the platform a “breakthrough in global financing,” comparable to long-standing creditor clubs such as the Paris Club and the London Club. Borrowers, he noted, have historically been excluded from discussions about their own debts, while paying interest rates more than twice those available to rich-country peers. The new body will not conjure money from thin air, but it may at last give the indebted a seat at the table they have long been denied.

Sources: UNCTAD; UN Secretary-General’s Expert Group on Debt, 2025; IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings, April 2026