Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: Ethiopia reaches a milestone in its debt relief process, the United States sanctions a major Rwandan gold refinery, and Cape Verde makes history at the FIFA World Cup.
After a tumultuous five-year struggle, there are signs that Ethiopia’s debt relief process may finally be nearing its end. On Monday, Addis Ababa announced that it had reached a preliminary deal to restructure its defaulted $1 billion international bond after private creditors threatened to sue the Ethiopian government in U.K. courts.
The restructuring has become a test case for the Group of 20’s Common Framework, which is designed to help developing nations unify debt negotiations among traditional Western creditors, non-Paris Club ones such as China, and private lenders.
Although Ethiopia’s debt relief process may be settled, it has highlighted divisions between sovereign creditors and private lenders as the two have argued over how to split financial losses—tensions that threatened to derail the steady growth that Ethiopia has seen in recent years.
