Bled dry: The gendered impact of tax abuse, illicit financial flows and debt in Africa

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. At the time, the Beijing Platform was considered the most progressive blueprint for advancing gender equality. Subsequently, the world set specific global targets for gender equality with the Millennium Development Goals in 2000 and the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. It felt like the world would continue to move towards progressively realizing greater gender equality so that women and girls in all their diversity could reach their full potential and enjoy the full spectrum of their human rights, unburdened by discrimination. Unfortunately, 2025 paints a bleaker picture than the one envisioned 30 years ago. According to UN Women, it would take 123 more years to close the gender gap at the current rate of progress.

The Alternative Information Development Center, the Center for Economic and Social Rights, and the Tax Justice Network have launched a paper today that shows how the global financial architecture affects women and girls, exacerbating the feminisation of poverty and further entrenching systemic gendered inequalities. In Bled Dry: How tax abuse, illicit financial flows and debt affect women and girls in Africa, we explore how tax abuse and illicit financial flows, and the resulting loss of public revenue, have pushed states towards regressive tax policies, debt, and austerity measures.

Tax justice is gender justice. Women and girls in all their diversity bear the brunt of the adverse effects of illicit financial flows, debt and austerity, especially on the African continent. Africa loses about US$88 billion annually in illicit financial flows, US$7.5 billion in tax revenues to multinational corporate profit shifting and offshore wealth, and currently owes US$1.16 trillion in debt. Africa spends more on debt servicing than on health or education. Illicit financial flows rob states of their ability to mobilise the maximum available resources to ensure that human rights, including women’s rights, are realised. When the state does not provide healthcare, women take care of the sick; when education is not affordable or accessible, women care for children who should be in school; when the state fails to provide clean water and energy, women travel as far as needed to fetch water and firewood.

Current neoliberal global economic policies uphold colonial models of extraction and deepen inequalities. For women and girls, this leads to the feminisation of poverty, higher maternal mortality rates, low school enrolment and early marriages, and pushes women into unpaid care work and informal employment. These issues affect women and girls across their lifetimes, from birth to adulthood. Currently, 62.8 per cent of the world’s poorest women and girls reside in sub-Saharan Africa, and African women spend significantly more time engaged in unpaid and domestic work compared to men across the continent.

The ongoing negotiations around the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation provide a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for reform of the global tax system. Therefore, it is imperative for the African Group of negotiators and Global South countries to engage boldly in the negotiation process, demanding more equitable and gender-responsive global tax systems. Global tax norms, institutional frameworks and practices must better enable African and Global South countries to maximise resource mobilisation for the good of people and planet, in line with existing obligations outlined in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), the Beijing Declaration and Platform of Action and the Sevilla Compromise, among others.

On the eve of Human Rights Day (2025), we demand global economic governance and policy reform that aligns international debt, tax, finance and investment policies with human rights principles. This reform must be genuinely gender-transformative and responsive to the needs of people and planet. It is time for governments to move beyond rhetoric and create a more equitable and inclusive global financial architecture grounded in the fair allocation of taxing rights.

Photo by David Geneugelijk, sourced from Unsplash.