The Debt Women Carry: Austerity, Care Work and Reparative Justice How does Africa’s debt crisis disproportionately burden women, and what would a gender-just approach to reparations look like?

How does Africa's debt crisis disproportionately burden women, and what would a gender-just approach to reparations look like? 

In this fifth episode, we analyze the intersectional impacts of austerity measures and debt servicing on African women and marginalized communities. We examine how the systemic erosion of public services like healthcare, education, and water acts as a modern tool of colonial subjugation, one that relies heavily on women's unpaid care work to cushion economic collapse and subsidize debt repayment. 

The discussion traces how colonial frameworks imposed patriarchal and capitalist models across African societies, restructuring labor, devaluing domestic work, and fueling persistent gendered inequalities. Drawing on African Futures Lab research across four former colonial powers and AFRODAD's feminist debt justice framework, we advocate for gender-transformative reparations that demand resource redistribution and the total dismantling of patriarchal financial structures.