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Nigeria hosted the 2026 Technical Group Meeting of the Intergovernmental Group of Twenty-Four on International Monetary Affairs and Development in Abuja this week, marking the first time the G-24 has convened its technical session on African soil, with delegates from 29 member nations delivering a blunt collective assessment: the global financial system, as currently structured, is actively working against the development prospects of the countries it was ostensibly built to serve.
The three-day gathering ran from February 18 to 20 at the Transcorp Hilton Hotel in the capital. Finance ministers, central bank governors, and senior policymakers from across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean gathered under the theme “Mobilising Finance to Promote Sustainable, Inclusive, and Job-Rich Economic Transformation.” Nigeria assumed the chair this year, a position held by Finance Minister Wale Edun, and used the platform to frame the meeting not as a routine technical consultation but as a strategic intervention at what he described as a “defining moment for the global economy.” The number that dominated discussion was $487 billion, the total amount that developing countries collectively paid in external debt service in 2023 alone, according to G-24 Secretariat Director Iyabo Masha. The significance of the figure becomes starker in context. Masha noted that rising debt costs are crowding out critical spending on infrastructure, education, healthcare, and climate resilience, and that many lower-rated economies continue to face elevated borrowing costs despite some easing in global financial conditions. Edun pushed the point further, telling delegates that annual debt servicing payments by Global South nations had surpassed the combined total of Official Development Assistance and Foreign Direct Investment flowing in from advanced economies. In other words, developing countries are now paying out more in debt service than they receive in aid and investment combined.
Nigeria’s own total public debt reached N152.40 trillion, approximately $99.66 billion, as of June 30, 2025, driven by increased domestic and external borrowing to fund fiscal deficits. The country’s debt service-to-revenue ratio stood at approximately 47 per cent in 2025, a level that economists describe as distress-adjacent even by the standards of developing nations. Yet Abuja this week positioned itself less as a cautionary case and more as a country with reform credentials worth amplifying to peers.
CBN Governor Olayemi Cardoso told the gathering that Nigeria’s reform programme had already delivered measurable results in cross-border payments, an area he identified as among the most pressing technical failures of the current international financial architecture. Cardoso said global remittance corridors still carry fees exceeding six per cent, settlement lags run to several days, and compliance burdens systematically exclude small and medium enterprises from global trade participation.
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He announced that reforms introduced since 2024 had pushed Nigeria’s monthly remittance inflows to approximately $600 million, up from $200 million previously, and said the target was $1 billion per month. Specific instruments introduced included the Non-Resident Nigerian Ordinary Account, the Non-Resident Nigerian Investment Account, and the Non-Resident BVN platform, all designed to connect diaspora Nigerians to the domestic financial system without physical presence requirements.
But Cardoso’s message on digital payments carried a warning as well as a success story. “Today, cross-border payments remain too slow, too costly, and too fragmented, especially for developing economies,” he said, describing the problem as “a macroeconomic and development priority” rather than a purely technical one. He cautioned that accelerating digital transformation without coordinated regulatory frameworks could introduce new risks, undermining monetary sovereignty, creating financial stability vulnerabilities, and, critically, leaving developing nations outside the governance structures of a system they would nonetheless be subject to.
“Success should be measured not only by speed and cost reductions, but by preservation of monetary and financial stability and inclusion of emerging markets in governance and rule-setting,” he said.
The meeting’s five panel sessions covered a range of interlocking challenges. One session examined the future of the Bretton Woods institutions, the IMF and the World Bank, at the 80-year mark since their founding at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference. Masha, who is the first African to lead the G-24 Secretariat since its establishment five decades ago, said the 80th anniversary represented an opportunity to reassess whether institutions designed in a very different geopolitical context remained fit for the demands of the current one. “Eighty years after their creation, the system must be renewed so developing countries shape global rules rather than merely adapt to them,” she said.
A second session tackled what has become one of the most technically contested issues in international tax policy, how governments can effectively tax large global digital companies such as Google, Facebook, and other platform businesses that generate significant revenue in developing markets while maintaining minimal or no physical presence there. Masha noted that if such revenues remain untaxed, digitalisation could erode domestic tax bases even as locally incorporated firms shoulder heavier fiscal burdens.
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The meeting also grappled with the geopolitical dimension of dollar dominance. Analysts and delegates acknowledged that the dollar’s central role in global transactions means that policy shifts in the United States, interest rate decisions, sanctions regimes, capital flow restrictions, reverberate across developing economies regardless of their own policy choices. Reform of that structural dependency remains one of the G-24’s longest-standing and least tractable agenda items.
Nigeria’s own tax reform trajectory featured in the discussions. Edun said the country plans to raise its tax-to-GDP ratio to 18 per cent in the medium term through modernised tax legislation, improved compliance systems, automation, and the National Single Window trade facilitation platform. The current ratio, by most estimates, remains among the lowest in Africa relative to GDP, a structural constraint that has forced successive governments into debt markets to fund basic expenditures.
The meeting concluded with calls for coordinated South-South cooperation and a collective push for modernised global financial architecture to support inclusive growth. The technical discussions will feed directly into G-24 ministerial-level deliberations, which are scheduled to take place on the sidelines of the IMF and World Bank Spring Meetings in Washington in April.
