Building what was never built for us: The Borrowers’ Platform and the fight to correct sovereign risk
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Article summary
- Borrowers’ Platform represents significant step in addressing long-standing imbalances in the global international financial architecture.
- Platform will provide affiliated states the opportunity to share experiences, discuss common challenges and coordinate through a formal mechanism – as long available for creditors.
Every borrowing country knows the moment when a risk model becomes a verdict. It comes quietly, in a rating note or a debt assessment. A sea-wall built to protect an airport is counted first as debt, or a clean energy project meant to cut fuel imports is treated as another fiscal burden.
The Borrowers’ Platform was created to answer that problem. Launched in Washington DC in mid-April, on the margins of the IMF and World Bank Spring Meetings, it followed the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4), in Seville, Spain, in 2025 (see Observer Summer 2025, Spring 2025). Rooted in the Compromiso de Sevilla, the FfD4 outcome document, the Platform gives borrowing countries their own space to build an evidence base, confidence and collective weight.
The Platform matters because it responds to a demand that long predates Seville. Since calls for a New International Economic Order in the 1970s, developing countries have sought greater agency within global economic governance (see Observer Autumn 2024). The debt crises of the 1980s, the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative, and recent debates on sovereign debt architecture exposed the same imbalance: those most affected by the rules often have the least influence over how they are made.
The institutions governing sovereign finance were built by a narrow set of actors at a particular historical moment. Many of today’s borrowers were absent from those rooms because colonial rule, unequal representation, and post-war power configurations which shaped the original architecture. The methods they adopted still carry traces of that origin.
A secretariat gives that space a working centre. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) is well placed for that role, with its long record of in-depth understanding of developing-country debt and financing constraints.
I served on the Working Group, comprising seven countries from the UN’s regional groups, that helped finalise the Platform’s institutional shape. I represented the Maldives, a small island developing state (SIDS), facing many constraints the initiative seeks to address. The discussions were technical, but the stakes were political. The Platform had to be borrower-led, trusted by members, and useful across different debt profiles and financing needs.
Long before a debt crisis reaches the negotiating table, many of its terms have already been set. Sovereign finance is shaped by an asymmetry of power between lenders and borrowers: the information, expertise, negotiating capacity and agenda-setting ability that determine how risk is judged (see Observer Winter 2025). It appears in rating reviews, debt sustainability assessments and market signals that move faster than government explanations.
The Platform will work to address the tangible costs of the current system
None of this means lenders and investors lack legitimate concerns when assessing sovereign risk. Indeed, markets perform an essential function in allocating capital and pricing uncertainty. The question, however, is whether risk is being fully understood. Existing methods are often better at measuring debt than recognising the resilience that debt may finance. They see the liability more clearly than the protection and stability behind it.
For SIDS, the cost is visible in numbers. ODI Global found in 2025 that ten SIDS issuing US dollar-denominated bonds between 2003 and 2023 will pay an estimated $78.7 billion in repayments on $36.6 billion borrowed. Had those countries borrowed at average rates available to Group of Seven (G7) industrialised economies, almost $34 billion could have been freed for climate resilience and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. That is what a risk premium costs.
For small economies, $34 billion is no abstraction. It is the sea-wall delayed, the clinic or island hospital left unbuilt, and the social protection that does not reach vulnerable families when prices rise or storms hit.
In the Maldives, we know this problem well. When we go to market, we pay a premium that our fundamentals do not justify. Much of what we borrow for is meant to reduce future risk. The debt appears immediately in the assessment, but the resilience it buys is harder to quantify.
Then the cycle tightens. Vulnerability is priced in. Capital becomes more expensive. Fiscal space narrows. Investment is delayed or scaled back. The next assessment sees the result and treats it as proof. The Platform’s role is practical and non-confrontational. It gives borrowers a setting for peer learning, technical exchange and structured dialogue with the institutions and markets that shape the price and terms of finance.
Still, some questions remain. During the Platform’s design, participants agreed that it should remain borrower-led, although views differed on what that meant in practice. Some wanted technical exchange. Others saw room for shared positions on systemic questions over time. More countries are now joining the Platform. Membership will endure only if it helps borrowers navigate the information gaps and technical imbalances that shape how they are judged. For too long, sovereign finance has spoken about borrowing countries with partial information. The Borrowers’ Platform gives them a place to find answers, and for borrowing countries to build what was never built for them.
