Hundreds of activists staged a protest demanding “Stop the harm! Cancel the Debt! Reparations and Just Transition Now!” in Mendiola, Manila on October 16, 2025.
The protest was in time for the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) in Washington DC, USA.
The demonstration brought together campaigners and activists from Oriang National Women’s Movement, Kilusan para sa Kabuhayan Kalusugan Kalikasan at Katiyakan sa Paninirahan, Sanlakas, Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino, Philippine Movement for Climate Justice. Aniban ng Manggagawa sa Agrikultura, Freedom from Debt Coalition, Zone One Tondo Organization, and the regional Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD).
APMDD Coordinator Lidy Nacpil said “the IMF and the World Bank remain key actors of the G7, the world’s richest countries, in worsening the climate and debt catastrophes. It is high time for these institutions to stop peddling more debts as solutions to crises, including the climate emergency caused by rich countries, and imposing their neoliberal policies and conditionalities of privatization and trade liberalization that violate people’s rights and intensify the climate emergency, while ensuring massive profits for big business.”
APMDD said, in a press release, the mobilization calls out “corruption as a systemic problem, requiring systemic solutions.”
The protest also highlighted shared demands for “debt cancellation and an end to austerity loan conditions, which are pushed especially upon cash-strapped countries in the Global South, stopping fossil-fuel lending, providing grants-based climate finance, payment of reparations for historical and continuing destruction, and for a Just Transition.”
“Asia and other regions of the Global South report unprecedented public debt levels and mounting debt servicing costs,” APMDD said.
Citing a report from UNCTAD, APMDD said “the public debt of developing countries swelled twice as fast as that of Global North economies since 2010, reaching $31 trillion by 2024. High interest costs saw $921 billion in interest payments alone in 2024. South and Southeast Asian countries, such as Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and the Philippines, saw public and publicly guaranteed foreign debts rising to more than half of their total external debt in 2023.”
Other protests were held in at least 50 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America in a Global Day of Coordinated Mobilizations, holding the IMF, WB, and G7 countries accountable for the debt, economic, and climate crisis.
Photo by Jimmy Domingo/Mata: Asia Press Photo
