Africa’s 2025 Debt Maturity Wall: Yuan Swaps, Local Bonds and the Rise of Real-Time Risk

For more than a decade, African governments surfed a global wave of cheap money.

From 2007 to 2024, annual sovereign bond issuance in Africa jumped from about US$70 billion to US$350 billion, while the stock of marketable bond debt ballooned from US$160 billion to US$730 billion.

Add in domestic borrowing and loans from multilaterals, China and private lenders, and total public debt on the continent has risen more than fourfold to around US$2 trillion.

In 2025, the bill is coming due.

A “maturity wall” of Eurobonds and other obligations is rolling toward a group of frontier and emerging African sovereigns, just as higher global rates, weaker growth and tight climate and development budgets collide. Around 70% of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa now face high or very high debt burdens, according to the latest Global Sovereign Debt Monitor.

Yet this is not just a story of looming defaults. It’s also about a rewiring of how Africa borrows – with new roles for the Chinese renminbi, local-currency bonds and data-driven risk tools.

How we got to the wall

Three numbers tell the tale.

• Africa’s external debt now averages about 26% of GDP, though many individual countries sit far higher.

• Median public debt across the region is around 57% of GDP, barely down from the previous year despite multiple restructurings.

• Governments spent an estimated US$163 billion servicing debt in 2024, nearly triple the figure in 2010, with average hard-currency yields hovering in the high single to low double digits.

For a while, refinancing that burden looked manageable. Low global interest rates, investors’ hunt for yield and upbeat “Africa rising” narratives made Eurobonds, syndicated loans and private placements relatively easy to roll.

Then came:

• The COVID shock

• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and food and fuel spikes

• Aggressive rate hikes in the U.S. and Europe

• A series of African downgrades and defaults

By 2023, the phrase “Eurobond wall” had become shorthand for a sequence of chunky redemptions in 2024–26.

Some countries – Ghana, Zambia, Ethiopia – went down the restructuring route. Others, like Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire, have returned to markets at much higher yields, testing investors’ appetite. Nigeria’s November 2025 Eurobond, for example, raised US$2.25 billion but at a significant risk premium, despite being hailed as a sign that conditions had improved.

The wall is still there. It is just being climbed with more improvisation.

Three new moves in Africa’s debt playbook

Faced with this crunch, African sovereigns are experimenting with three big shifts.

1. From dollars to renminbi – at the margin

China remains a key creditor and, in some cases, co-chair of restructuring committees. But a quieter change is underway: Beijing is encouraging African partners to settle more trade and debt in renminbi (RMB) and to issue local-currency bonds into China’s domestic market.

IMF work on Africa-China linkages notes Beijing’s openness to supporting RMB settlement and Panda bonds – renminbi-denominated issues by foreign borrowers into China.

For African treasuries, RMB borrowing can:

• Diversify away from an all-dollar liability profile

• Align funding with Chinese-linked infrastructure and trade flows

• Potentially lower FX risk when projects generate RMB revenues

But it also raises new questions: how to manage RMB alongside dollars and euros, how transparent the terms really are, and how to avoid simply swapping one concentration risk for another.

2. The pivot to local-currency markets

After years of Eurobond dominance in headlines, local-currency debt is quietly doing more of the heavy lifting.

New analysis of Africa’s domestic debt boom shows a structural rise in local bonds held by banks, pension funds and insurers, as sovereigns tap home markets when external conditions tighten.

An OECD capital-markets report describes this as a “sovereign financing reset”: governments relying more on local-currency issuance and regional bond platforms to secure long-term funding.

The advantages are clear:

• Lower direct FX risk

• A broader, more stable domestic investor base

• Scope to lengthen maturities over time

The risks are equally clear:

• Crowding out private borrowers as governments soak up domestic savings

• Loading banks and pension funds with large sovereign exposures

• Interest-cost spikes when local rates rise

Kenya offers a live example. In 2025 it began exploring buybacks of near-term local bonds using proceeds from longer-dated issues, hoping to smooth a domestic maturity hump of roughly KES 1.3 trillion falling due over two years.

The local market, in other words, is now both the safety valve and a new source of vulnerability.

3. Rethinking the Common Framework – and using it earlier

The G20’s Common Framework was meant to deliver orderly, timely debt treatments for low-income countries. So far, it has disappointed.

A recent analysis by ONE finds that the Framework has so far reduced the external debt stock of distressed low-income borrowers by only about 7%, with most of that relief concentrated in Ghana and Zambia.

As more African countries flirt with distress, pressure is growing for:

• Clearer timelines and comparability rules

• Earlier use of restructuring tools, before reserves are exhausted

• Better integration of climate, development and debt objectives

In the meantime, however, markets are forcing their own version of the playbook: opportunistic buybacks, switch auctions, liability-management exercises and, for some, pre-emptive talks with creditors outside any formal framework.

Why this is a portfolio problem, not just a policy problem

For finance ministries, the maturity wall is about refinancing.

For banks, pension funds, insurers and asset managers, it is about portfolio construction.

Consider what has changed in just a few years:

• Domestic institutions hold far more local sovereign bonds, often at higher yields and longer maturities.

• Many also hold Eurobonds, syndicated loans and structured notes from the same governments.

• Supply chains mean a bank’s credit book may be indirectly exposed to sovereign stress via SOEs and contractors.

• New RMB, climate and local-currency instruments are entering the mix, often with complex terms.

At the system level, the questions now look like this:

• How much of our total balance sheet depends on a handful of African sovereigns successfully refinancing their 2025–28 wall?

• How are those exposures split across currencies, maturities and instruments?

• What happens to capital and member outcomes if yields widen another 300–400 basis points – or if one major name opts for reprofiling?

These are not questions that can be answered once a year in a PDF. They demand real-time, look-through risk infrastructure.

Where Verī Platform fits: AI-driven x-ray vision for the maturity wall

This is exactly the environment Verī Platform is built for.

Verī sits behind regulated institutions – not in front of retail investors – and acts as a multi-market, multi-currency x-ray across portfolios.

For African and global banks, asset managers, pension funds and insurers facing the 2025 maturity wall, Verī can:

• Consolidate all sovereign exposures – Eurobonds, local bonds, T-bills, loans, guarantees, SOE paper, RMB instruments – into a single, look-through ledger at client, portfolio and institution level.

• Tag and visualise risk by country, currency, maturity bucket, creditor class and instrument type, so a CIO can see, in seconds, how much depends on each sovereign and each segment of the curve.

• Use AI-driven analytics to run stress scenarios: for example, a parallel shift in yields, a currency shock, or an assumed reprofiling under a reformed Common Framework.

• Integrate ESG and climate overlays, recognising that future restructurings may be linked to climate or SDG targets.

• Generate regulator-friendly reports that help supervisors understand where sovereign-risk concentrations sit in the system – and how they are evolving as countries refinance or restructure.

Verī does not tell anyone whether to issue in dollars, RMB or local currency, or whether to accept a restructuring term sheet.

It provides the plumbing and intelligence layer so that, whatever choices are made, institutions and regulators can see the full consequences – before those choices collide with the wall.

Africa’s debt story in 2025 is not just about danger. It is also about experimentation:

• New currencies in the mix

• Deeper local markets and regional platforms

• A contested, but evolving, architecture for restructurings

• A slow shift toward data-rich, AI-assisted risk management

The maturity wall is real. Some countries will glide over it; others will crash into it; a few will tunnel around via creative deals.

For investors and policymakers, the real divide may be simpler:

Between those who go into this next phase with granular, real-time visibility of their exposures – and those who discover, too late, that they were standing closer to the wall than they thought.

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