The development of payment infrastructure in emerging-market economies (EMEs), from instant payment systems in retail markets to wholesale central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) for cross-border interbank settlement, is part of a broader technological transformation. But the intense scrutiny these initiatives face from the United States (US) signals that what is at stake is not only technical supremacy, but monetary power itself.
Changes to how payments are executed imply a shift in control over the critical infrastructure through which money circulates, with consequences for the exercise of monetary sovereignty. While sovereignty in monetary affairs was traditionally understood as the authority to issue currency, it expanded over time to include oversight of banking systems and financial flows. In an increasingly digitalised world, however, sovereignty now hinges on the mechanisms underpinning payments and settlements, and the data generated by financial transactions.
This shift is especially visible in EMEs, where formal sovereignty has long coexisted with structural dependence. For years, the dollar’s dominance has rested not only on its status as a global currency but also on a dense network of privately governed infrastructure, such as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), the New York Clearing House Interbank Payments System (CHIPS), and the Continuous Linked Settlement (CLS). These networks shape how cross-border payments and financial settlements are conducted.
Far from being neutral conduits, these US-dominated systems embed geopolitical power into the routine functioning of global finance, enabling “weaponised interdependence” through sanctions, exclusion, and control over financial flows.
Brazil’s Pix is a case in point. An instant payment platform created and managed by the Central Bank of Brazil, Pix has rapidly become a central pillar of the country’s financial architecture, surpassing payment cards in transaction volume. It embodies a governance model in which the state manages both payment rules and the data generated by transactions, an increasingly important source of economic and strategic power.
This has clearly spooked the US. The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) opened an investigation into Brazil and included Pix in its 2026 National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers, under the broader category of “non-market policies and practices” that may generate “economic and national security risks” to the US. The report positions state-led payment infrastructure, data-localisation measures, and digital regulations as potential distortions of competition that disadvantage foreign firms, particularly US financial-service providers.
But Brazil is not an isolated case. The USTR report expresses similar concerns about efforts in India, China, Indonesia, Turkey, Vietnam, Pakistan, Algeria, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, and Thailand to develop domestic payment systems and strengthen regulatory control over digital and financial infrastructure, including through data-localisation requirements.
This trend reflects a broader global shift toward a state-led approach to building financial infrastructure for the digital economy. Domestic payment systems, including Pix and India’s UPI, should therefore be understood as part of a wider movement among EMEs to reclaim control over the rails on which money and financial data move. Such a structural shift becomes even more consequential at the cross-border level, unlocking the potential to connect domestic instant payment systems (such as the Bank for International Settlements-led Project Nexus) and, crucially, to use CBDCs for wholesale transactions.
Projects such as mBridge, which brings together China, Hong Kong, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, with initial support from the BIS, as well as emerging BRICS+ initiatives, illustrate how CBDCs can be used to redesign international payment infrastructure. By integrating messaging, clearing, and settlement, a single, state-governed platform may reduce reliance on traditional intermediaries and enable direct settlement in local currencies.
More importantly, this approach embeds public authority into the technological architecture of payments and settlements, expressed in code, protocols, and governance rules. Monetary sovereignty, in this context, becomes infrastructure. It is exercised through the design and control of systems that support cross-border financial flows.
For EMEs, this represents a strategic opportunity. By reducing dependence on dollar-based infrastructure and enabling settlement in local currencies, multi-CBDC platforms and a standardised protocol linking domestic instant payment systems provide a pathway, albeit still limited, to expand the external dimension of monetary sovereignty.
To be sure, these developments do not signal the end of dollar dominance. The structural foundations of today’s US-led system, from deep and liquid domestic financial markets to strong network effects and global demand for dollar-denominated assets, are robust. The rapid expansion of dollar-backed stablecoins may even reinforce this dominance in the digital realm.
But a more fragmented and contested landscape is emerging. The new initiatives are reconfiguring the existing system at the margins, creating alternative channels, redistributing power (albeit to a limited degree), and, above all, demonstrating that infrastructure, not currency, is the primary terrain of monetary competition.
This evolution has two important implications. First, future conflicts in the international monetary system are likely to centre on standards, platforms, and data governance rather than exchange rates or reserve currencies. And, EMEs are no longer merely passive recipients of global financial standards. They are becoming drivers of institutional and technological innovation.
In this context, the central question is no longer who issues money, but who designs and governs the infrastructure through which it moves. The answer will not be determined by technological efficiency alone. It will be shaped by law, institutional choices, and geopolitical strategy, ultimately defining the future distribution of monetary power.
Africa’s development-finance gap is the continent’s biggest challenge, and at its core, it is a design problem. In the absence of the instruments and regulatory pathways needed to channel domestic savings toward productive investment, much of the continent’s capital remains trapped in short-term sovereign debt. This raises a fundamental question.
What would it take to build a development-finance system that can actually finance development?
The answer is intelligence. Integrated and forward-looking macro-financial analysis can identify whether the system is functioning and where risks are building before unexpected shocks bring vulnerabilities to the surface.
Africa currently lacks three key elements of financial intelligence, starting with a clear view of contingent liabilities. This is most evident not in distressed economies, where some form of oversight exists, but in countries that are not subject to close macro-financial monitoring. Ironically, these are often the countries where new financial instruments are spreading most rapidly.
A second vulnerability lies in the nature of macroeconomic discussions between development-finance institutions and governments. These interactions tend to be strictly transactional. While they often reassure policymakers that the country’s fiscal position is stable, new liabilities are rarely incorporated into macroeconomic risk assessments, allowing pressures to build.
Lastly, there is no pan-African analytical benchmark for pricing new financial instruments. Without a common framework to evaluate a credit-enhanced bond in Nairobi, a blended-finance vehicle in Abidjan, and a guaranteed infrastructure bond in Lagos on comparable terms, risk is bound to be systematically mispriced. When the first default arrives, investors will not retreat selectively. They will exit the asset class altogether. Consequently, the track record needed for these markets to mature will not develop.
This is a structural problem, not an institutional failure. Global macro-surveillance institutions focus on systemically important markets by design, leaving most African capital markets outside their purview. Meanwhile, regional development banks have the necessary macroeconomic expertise, but their analytical work is oriented toward stability rather than tracking capital flows and contingent liabilities. National regulators, for their part, operate within narrow jurisdictions, and credit rating agencies mostly cover sovereign debt rather than the local and blended instruments on which the new credit architecture depends.
The result is a fragmented analytical landscape in which no institution can integrate available information into a system-wide risk assessment.
That said, creating a new institution is neither necessary nor practical. In advanced economies, the market itself integrates pricing and risk assessment through a mature buy-side and sell-side ecosystem that guides capital allocation. While Africa’s ecosystem remains less developed, with limited investment-banking capacity and sparse buy-side research, this is merely a transitional condition.
Transitions, however, do not manage themselves. Until markets become deep enough to sustain their own intelligence infrastructure, a larger institution should fill the gap. The African Development Bank (AfDB) is uniquely positioned to fill that role. Working closely with the governments of its 54 regional member countries, it has direct knowledge of fiscal positions, debt structures, and domestic policy constraints.
The AfDB also structures transactions across a growing range of new instruments, in cooperation with domestic pension funds, global asset managers, and development finance institutions. No other body has that kind of sovereign reach, transaction visibility, and investor access. Yet this role is not fully reflected in the Bank’s mandate. As the financial system evolves, its mandate must evolve with it.
Closing Africa’s intelligence gap requires tracking contingent liabilities as guarantees are approved, not after financing has already been structured. Each guarantee adds to a government’s balance sheet and, therefore, should be tracked as it is created, taking into account the country’s debt trajectory and the conditions under which the government would have to honour the liability. Another priority is developing common analytical standards for emerging asset classes, as markets cannot mature without shared frameworks for pricing, monitoring, and stress-testing.
Few institutions are better suited to establish such standards than the AfDB. Its transaction volume, continental reach, and investor relationships give it the credibility needed to ensure they are widely adopted.
Building the necessary analytical capacity also demands a profound cultural shift. Inside development banks, economic analysis and project financing have long worked in parallel, with economists producing reports while deal teams structure transactions. For the system to work, economic intelligence cannot remain merely a research product. It should inform decision-making in real time, guiding capital allocation and risk assessment. Crucially, that shift cannot be imposed from outside. It has to be led from within.
Most importantly, financial intelligence cannot be separated from the creation of coordination platforms and domestic savings reform. The three are mutually reinforcing parts of the same system. Platforms without intelligence allow risks to accumulate unnoticed, and without platforms, new instruments never scale beyond one-off transactions, leaving risk analysts with nothing to price.
Africa has the savings and the ambition to build a world-class development-finance system. What it needs now is the analytical infrastructure that can translate coordinated initiatives into functioning capital markets, along with the institutional and political support required to sustain them.
A group of developing countries launched the Borrowers’ Platform last month to create a stronger collective voice in debt management discussions and international financial negotiations.
While the initiative is grounded in the Sevilla Commitment, adopted at last year’s Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development held in Spain, it was long in the making. To paraphrase the French literary giant Victor Hugo, nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come.
For decades, developing countries have been forced to navigate an increasingly complex international financial system. With systemic and geopolitical risks mounting, uncertainty has become the new normal, prompting a growing chorus of Global South policymakers to call for greater collaboration and coordination. The Sevilla Commitment formalised this idea, with United Nations (UN) member states agreeing to “establish a platform for borrower countries with support from existing institutions, and a UN entity serving as its secretariat.”
The hope was to create a venue for these countries to discuss technical issues, share information on addressing debt challenges, access technical assistance and capacity building in debt management, coordinate their approaches, and influence the global debt architecture.
The Borrowers’ Platform arrives not a moment too soon. In 2024, 61 developing countries spent at least 10pc of government revenue on debt service, while 3.4 billion people live in countries that spend more on interest payments than on health or education. The high costs of servicing the debt these countries have accumulated to finance their development are now threatening that agenda.
Interdependent and overlapping global crises, coupled with the most significant and prolonged period of monetary policy tightening in more than two decades, have resulted in a widening gap between developing countries’ interest payments and government revenue. This leaves policymakers with extremely limited fiscal space for public investment, including to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 and to build climate resilience.
Compounding these countries’ dilemma, the nature of sovereign debt has changed remarkably in recent years, reflecting shifts in creditor composition and the use of more complex instruments and contractual innovations.
Negotiating such a complex system requires informed and capable policymakers supported by skilled teams in finance ministries and debt-management agencies, a challenge even for advanced economies. Meanwhile, existing global debt frameworks have not kept pace with these changes and remain unresponsive to the needs of countries in debt distress, many of which are in the Global South. As a result, these economies are left to face acute financing pressures on their own, lacking the institutions (both formal and informal) that have long enabled creditors to align their activities.
The Borrowers’ Platform seeks to change that. It recognises that indebted countries have much to learn from each other’s experiences. Equally important, it can help these countries build capacity to identify and address debt challenges by providing coordinated technical assistance on issues ranging from debt management to engagement with rating agencies and other financial-market actors. There is strength in numbers when it comes to advocating for relevant and necessary reforms to the global debt system.
Developing countries were quick to seize on the agreement reached in Seville. To move the process forward, a working group comprising representatives from Egypt (chair), Zambia, Pakistan (vice-chair), Nepal, Colombia, Honduras, and the Maldives was established. With support from UN Trade & Development experts, the group developed and agreed on a preliminary framework outlining the platform’s objectives, membership eligibility, and governance structure, which prospective members can consider and adapt during the interim phase.
Membership is open to developing countries that are UN member states, bilateral borrowers, and not permanent or full members of a creditor association. Of the more than 100 countries that meet these criteria and have been invited to join, over 30 have done so.
As the interim chair of the Borrowers’ Platform, I am committed to ensuring that the group delivers tangible results and evolves into an effective mechanism for all participating countries. Members have already begun working together on a voluntary, non-binding basis to achieve common objectives, such as promoting peer learning, establishing a knowledge repository, and enhancing the quality and integrity of debt-related data. Thus, borrower countries are signalling to markets a willingness and ability to improve debt practices and development-finance outcomes.
While the launch of the Borrowers’ Platform is a welcome milestone, it is only the beginning. Its success will require sustained engagement by member countries, continued support from international partners, and a shared commitment to practical, results-oriented cooperation.
The European Union’s (EU) Foreign Affairs Spokesperson, Anouar El Anouni, issued a statement on April 30, 2026, voicing the EU’s concerns, calling for immediate de-escalation, and warning against actions that could imperil the Pretoria Deal. The statement came amid rising tensions after the TPLF moved to restore the pre-war political structures in Tigray Regional State, a step that challenged the Interim Administration, led by Tadesse Werede (Lt. Gen.), created under the Pretoria agreement. Days later, the restored regional council elected Debretsion Gebremichael (PhD), the TPLF chairman, as regional president, reviving the political order associated with the disputed 2020 regional election, one of the flashpoints in the breakdown of relations between the federal government and teh TPLF before the civil war.
The percentage of candidates running under independent platforms out of a total of 10,933 candidates registered with the National Electoral Board of Ethiopia (NEBE) for the national polls scheduled for June 2026.
Ethiopian Investment Holdings (EIH) is relocating its headquarters from its current site on General Wingate Street. The former headquarters was located behind the Ministry of Industry and near Abrehot Library.
The new office is expected to be on Mozambique Street, along the route from Mexico Square to Bulgaria Road. The building belongs to one of EIH’s subsidiaries, and all departments are set to move there as interior design and finishing works continue.
Under the leadership of Brook Taye (PhD), EIH oversees major state-owned enterprises, including Ethiopian Airlines Group, Ethiopian Electric Power, and Ethio telecom. Its portfolio covers 24 audited companies, with total assets reaching about 3.5 trillion Br in 2024.
The Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) remains the largest entity by assets, valued at about 1.4 trillion Br. The portfolio recorded a net margin of 13.1pc and a return on assets of 2.9pc.
Based on combined revenue of 774 billion Br, the enterprises generated an estimated net profit of about 101.4 billion Br in the 2024 fiscal year. Total liabilities stood at roughly 2.3 trillion Br.
A push for import substitution and industrial expansion has prioritised 96 strategic products for local manufacturing.
The “Ethiopia Tamirt” initiative reports 4.85 billion dollars in savings, supported by trade fairs linking local producers to domestic and international markets.
On average, 700 new projects enter the market annually, contributing to more than 2,800 investments over four years. At the grassroots level, 18,000 SMEs have been established, while 993 dormant factories have resumed operations, strengthening employment creation.
Financing has expanded significantly, with SME credit rising from 8.1 billion Br to 50 billion Br, and large-scale industrial lending exceeding 262 billion Br. Infrastructure support includes 3.3 gigawatts of electricity allocation and 2.28 billion dollars in foreign exchange backing.
Raw material supply has grown from nine million to 15 million tonnes annually, improving factory utilisation from 47pc to 67pc.
The Federal Housing Corporation and the government of Central Equatoria State in South Sudan signed a Memorandum of Understanding in Juba on May 5, 2026, to collaborate on housing development projects covering residential, commercial, and government buildings.
The agreement was signed by Federal Housing Corporation CEO Reshad Kemal (PhD) and Governor Emmanuel Adil.
The deal establishes a framework for joint work in housing construction and urban development in Juba, including the transfer of expertise in housing administration and project implementation. Reshad said the corporation will extend its housing development experience beyond its domestic market, noting a shift from preparation to implementation in its external engagement strategy.
The two sides agreed to form a technical committee to oversee project preparation, documentation, monitoring, and implementation, including design and administrative follow-up.
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