African governments are expanding fossil fuel production to service mounting external debt.
This leads to compromising public services like health and education.
The debt-driven extraction exacerbates gender injustices and environmental degradation, with women bearing the brunt.
The report calls for a Fossil Fuel Treaty to support a just transition to renewable energy and alleviate the debt burden.
African governments are being forced to expand fossil fuel production at the expense of critical public services, including health and education, and with far-reaching consequences on food security, health and water. The governments are spending revenues earned from the fossil fuel on servicing debts, with external borrowing doubling since 2020 to over $1 trillion and interest on debt more than doubling over the last 15 years to an estimated $163 billion.
Due to the debt burden, the countries are also unable to invest in public goods such as infrastructure and social protection systems, all of which could benefit women and the marginalised enhance general wellbeing of the people.
The lack of expenditure on improving basic social services, makes the international community accomplices in violating the human rights of African people particularly women, “who subsidise social services through their unpaid labour”, according to a report by campaign groups-African Forum and Network on Debt and Development (AFRODAD) and the Fossil Fuel Treaty.
In part to blame for the crisis is the international infrastructure, including structural adjustment programmes, trade liberalisation and International Monetary Fund (IMF)-imposed austerity measures, that have forced African governments to prioritise debt repayments.
The report showed that the countries are trapped in an “economic architecture” designed to drain wealth and resources from the continent to the Global North, and are finding themselves adopting austerity measures and resource extraction.
“Climate change’s biggest drivers — fossil fuels — continue to enjoy investment under a narrative that they are necessary for Africa’s energy security and development. Yet, the evidence is emerging that coal, oil and gas extraction are not only contributing to the debt-based structural entrapment of Africa,” it warned.
Africa, the report noted, is paying for a climate crisis it did not create — first by being on the ‘frontlines’ of the devastating impacts of extreme weather, displacement, loss and damage, and secondly, through solutions to climate change that drive more debt, extract more than they restore and weakening countries’ economic resilience.
“For countries with the least historical responsibility and the greatest structural constraints, the proposed Fossil Fuel Treaty offers a pathway to pursue a planned and just transition away from fossil fuels in ways that strengthen economic sovereignty, public legitimacy, and socio-economic and environmental justice, it added.
The report Gender, Debt and Fossil Fuels: A Mapping of Key Insights from the African Continent asserted that climate change, fossil fuel extraction and debt all reinforce gender injustices on their own. As a result, Africa is at the frontlines of the global climate, fossil fuels and debt ‘polycrisis' that is largely based on unjust systems perpetuating extraction of resources to the Global North.
The crisis, according to the authors of the report, was particularly disadvantageous to women and girls, wth the gender experiencing the worst impacts.
“Africa is being pushed to drill its way out of debt under a global economic model that treats debt service as sacrosanct. When governments cut health, education and social protection to reassure creditors, the strain does not disappear; it is displaced into women’s unpaid labour, dispossession and the violence through which fossil fuel extraction is enforced,” according to a statement by authors Bemnet Agata and Amiera Sawas on behalf of the organisations.
The document asserted that fossil fuel extraction imposes a “spectrum of violence” against communities, and women and girls are the most vulnerable.
“Whether in Mozambique, Nigeria, Uganda or Tanzania, women and girls are more at risk to the impacts of land dispossession and displacement by oil and gas projects. Militarisation aimed at securing extraction projects drive repression, persecution and sexual violence by corporate and state security forces,” the researchers wrote in the report.
“Africa is being pushed to drill its way out of debt under a global economic model that treats debt service as sacrosanct. When governments cut health, education and social protection to reassure creditors, the strain does not disappear; it is displaced — into women’s unpaid labour, dispossession and the violence through which fossil fuel extraction is enforced,” it noted.
Fossil fuels also cause environmental destruction that is linked to health and social crises due to pollution, food insecurity, land degradation and water contamination, all of which disproportionately peril women. This compels movements of women and Indigenous civil society to come to the frontlines of environmental defense, inevitably exposing them to state violence.
It is critical to explore how fossil fuels are intricately tied in with gendered identities and patriarchy and its expressions of violence through what it calls ‘petromasculinity’.
Scientists define petromasculinity as the fusion of authoritarian masculine identities with militarism, corporate fossil fuel interests, underpinning state violence, where “fossil fuel use can function as a violent compensatory practice in reaction to gender and climate trouble”.
The concept escalates gender-based violence and the social, economic and political exclusion of women, girls and gender minorities. “Despite the risk, women and Indigenous leaders have been at the forefront of calling for a just energy and economic transition rooted in feminist and principles of fairness, where all people, societies and nations have equal opportunities to lead and benefit,” said Amiera Sawas, co-author of the report and director of research for the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative.
“African feminists have long been calling our attention to the myriad ways that debt, fossil fuel extraction and climate change are impacting women’s and girls’ rights. It’s time the international community listened,” he added.
He called for international cooperation and solidarity via a Fossil Fuel Treaty to support nations to cancel and renegotiate debt repayments and to access fairer finance for renewable energy systems.
For the reason, any serious conversation about a just transition must begin by recognising the reality of the fossil industry in Africa, and its consequences on the wellbeing of the people.
It recommends that African countries can benefit from participating in an international treaty that supports a fair phase-out of fossil fuels, one in which the wealthiest and most responsible nations act first. and fastest, while enabling a financed, justice-based transition to a renewable energy future.
Nations participating in such a treaty could create a platform for renegotiating and cancelling some external debt to create space for an equitable transition.
Such a transition should move communities away from fossil fuels towards decentralised, accessible renewable energy for all, and phase out of oil, gas and coal while building diverse, resilient and “gender-just” economies.
Overall, the paper calls for new approaches to tackling the triple challenge of debt crises, fossil fuelled entrapment and gendered violence, warning that past proposals have failed to address the root of the problem.