Africa’s voice at the G20: Will Johannesburg deliver?

South Africa’s G20 presidency comes at an increasingly difficult moment for international cooperation and consensus building. Although it marks a significant milestone in advancing African voices within global policy processes, these same processes have come under tremendous pressure.

Nevertheless, this G20 has provided a unique opportunity for South Africa and Africa to articulate and advance African priorities on the global stage. As the fourth consecutive developing country presidency of the G20, South Africa has also sought to consolidate the broader Global South development agenda, which was the focus of the preceding presidencies.

South Africa identified four priorities for its presidency, which resonate with the challenges facing African states. The first is the issue of debt sustainability, especially for low-income countries. In 2023, 54 developing countries, of which nearly half were in Africa, spent at least 10% of government funds on debt interest payments. Today, 3.3 billion people live in countries that spend more on debt payments than on health or education. The G20 Common Framework for Debt Treatments, adopted in 2020 to help countries in debt distress, has fallen short of the mark. Only four countries – all in Africa – have applied to it, but the process has been slow. Creditors are the Paris Club and also private creditors and emerging economies such as China, which adds further complexity. In May 2025, the African Union Declaration on Debt highlighted that a more comprehensive approach to sovereign debt restructuring was necessary in the long term.

However, a major overhaul of the Common Framework will not be the outcome this year. Rather there will be an incremental effort to improve the existing framework.

Related to Africa’s debt sustainability is the high cost of capital. South Africa has raised the tenor of the debate on this issue, through its initial proposal to establish a cost of capital commission, which became part of the African Expert Panel chaired by South Africa’s former finance minister Trevor Manuel.

Second, climate and energy transitions are another key focus, with South Africa amplifying calls for a just energy transition and related financing through country platforms. South Africa has sought to emphasise that the quality of climate finance is as important as the quantity. Yet this priority has been especially challenging. Both ministerial meetings on the energy transitions and on environment and climate sustainability ended with only chair’s summaries, as ministers were unable to reach consensus.

Conversely, South Africa’s third priority on disaster resilience and response and scaling up post-disaster reconstruction has met with some success, insofar as there was a ministerial declaration. This emphasised the need to mobilise resources from a variety of financing sources as well as financing that enabled ex ante disaster risk reduction.

South Africa’s fourth priority is harnessing critical minerals for inclusive growth and sustainable development. This is being tackled through the Task Force on Inclusive Economic Growth, Industrialisation, Employment and Reduced Inequality, one of three task forces established by the presidency. Africa is blessed with many critical minerals that are essential for green industrialisation and the energy transition. However, the growing geopolitical contestation over critical minerals could see external actors repeat the cycle of exploitation and resource extraction in Africa.

Putting this issue on the G20 agenda reflects Africa’s concern and intention to amplify the continent’s efforts at a coordinated strategy to ensure value addition and industrialisation through these minerals. This is crucial to the African agenda, as is support for the African Continental Free Trade Area, which includes creating regional value chains to shift from raw resource extraction to value- added production. The presidency aims to adopt a voluntary G20 Critical Minerals Framework.

The presidency’s two other task forces focus on food security, also a major concern of African countries, and on artificial intelligence, data governance and innovation. The presidency has championed digital inclusion, fostering international partnerships to bridge the digital divide through investment in infrastructure, data governance and skills development. These efforts were highlighted at the AI for Africa Conference.

The priorities that South Africa put on the G20 table this year are both bold and embedded in real African challenges. Neither debt and the cost of capital nor climate finance and critical minerals are easy topics to tackle at the global level in an increasingly fraught geopolitical context. Many foundational norms and international agreements of the last three decades are being tested and questioned. Solidarity with the more vulnerable and international cooperation to advance public goods would ordinarily have received global support, even if the implementation of the ensuing commitments was lukewarm.

The Johannesburg Summit will probably produce a declaration, but the presidency’s ambition, reflected in its agenda, is unlikely to be realised in practice. The challenge of realising an ambitious agenda is not new to the G20. Summit declarations brim with commitments. But consensus will be even more difficult this year, with some members disputing climate change or the validity of the Sustainable Development Goals.

However, the presidency and the summit will raise the awareness and global discourse on matters that are crucial to Africa’s development, helping to shape the narrative and laying the foundation for future presidencies, and other global policy processes, to take issues forward.