I marched to make poverty history - what happened?
However, 20 years on, we have to ask ourselves if the international community – particularly the world's most powerful countries – fulfilled the promises they made, and which so many of us bore witness to.
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Today, 32 African countries now spend more on external debts than they do on healthcare. Twenty-five African countries spend more on external debt payments than on education. It's girls, women and the disabled who are hardest hit by the lack of access to education, healthcare, and protection of their environment.
In 2023, African countries spent over 50 times more on external debt than they received in aid from the UK. That was before the UK Government took the disastrous decision to further cut overseas development aid, and well before Elon Musk's DOGE took a hatchet to the USAID budget.
Elon Musk said he was taking a chainsaw to bureaucracy. (Image: PA) How did we get here again? The problem is that the deck remains stacked against poorer countries, particularly when they are invariably hit with other crises.
In 2008 the global financial crash hurt all economies and poorer countries were encouraged to borrow from private creditors. These creditors lent at higher rates.
Global corporations still evaded their responsibilities in paying fair tax whilst exploiting poorer countries' natural resources without adequate compensation. And the impacts of climate change disasters like floods, storms and droughts mounted for those countries; countries such as Malawi, which Scotland has had a long historical friendship with over centuries. Those countries least responsible for the climate emergency are the ones which continue to bear the greater financial and human cost. Then came the Covid global pandemic which took many poorer countries to the brink of collapse.
Today, 90% of these debt contracts are overseen by English law and the UK Government has not taken sufficient action yet to ensure that these creditors are compelled to negotiate fairly. And these companies held the threat of legal action when poorer countries tried to renegotiate terms.
These are not idle threats from private creditors. South Sudan, a country facing a humanitarian catastrophe, has been successfully sued for $657 million by Afreximbank in the UK courts in 2025 after defaulting on high-interest loans from the profit-making lender. Ethiopia has been trying to renegotiate and is threatened with being sued. Zambia faced a devastating food emergency in 2024 as a result of a terrible drought and yet has been stuck for four years negotiating whilst still having to pay loans. Private creditors have yet to agree fairer terms and are dragging their feet.
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Thanks to Labour MP Bambos Charalambous, there is the chance to make the system work better when it is due to come back for debate in the House of Commons but so far the UK Government has dragged its feet in helping make his Private Member's Bill law. It won't cost the UK taxpayer anything. Last time UK Labour enacted a law around debt, it didn't negatively impact on the city of London.
If the UK wants to be taken seriously at the climate negotiations in November, it would be in their interests to have a Private Creditors' Law on their legislative slate given how the impact of climate change is adding to the mounting debt burden on the shoulders of the world's poorest.
It was the great Scottish explorer, missionary and abolitionist Dr David Livingstone who famously said: 'Sympathy is no substitute for action.' We need to demand action from our political leaders, just as we did twenty years ago, in order to stop the poorest in the world being stuck in a cycle of despair and crippling poverty.
I hope Scotland can stand with the developing countries like Zambia and call for this debt loophole to be closed, too. And add our voice to the need for a permanent UN system to prevent and resolve debt crises.
Humza Yousaf is MSP for Glasgow Pollok and a former First Minister.
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