Life or Debt

In Life or Debt, Crystal Simeoni and other pan-African scholars highlight how neoliberal macroeconomic frameworks have acted inequitably to exploit labour and dependency across Africa. Specifically, they find that external impositions of debt burden, unilateral trade agreements, and foreign aid conditions have functioned to divert state action away from the actual needs of African societies, which has a rippling effect across the care economy. They specify here how policies of austerity and privatization have reinforced these conditions, heightening the rates of civilian poverty, maternal mortality, and gendered social reproduction.

Crystal Simeoni is a Pan African feminist activist working on macro level economic issues. She currently serves as the Director of Nawi Afrifem Macroeconomics Collective (The Nawi Collective), which is a Care Economies in Context affiliated project partner for Africa.

Citation

Simeoni, C., Oriye O., Joanita, N., Mathibela N. (2026). Life or Debt. https://nawi.africa/written-resources/life-or-debt-pan-african-feminist-musings-on-african-debt-free-futures

Excerpt

Feminist economists have begun to name this the reproductive digital debt trap – the use of credit to finance the daily reproduction of life and labour. Women, already stretched by unpaid care work, now stretch their indebtedness too. Debt extends into every corner of their day: cooking, commuting, working, caregiving. It
has become the hidden wage of austerity. The violence of this system is often invisible but deeply felt. It is the tightening in the chest each time a payment reminder pings, the shame of having one’s contacts messaged by a lender, the exhaustion of working longer hours just to stay afloat. For many, the boundary between life and labour collapses into an unending loop of earning and repayment. Debt produces not only scarcity but anxiety, guilt, and depletion; the emotional residues of a system that extracts not just wages, but dignity. This violence rarely takes the form of a crisis. It builds slowly, through exhaustion and depletion, leaving its marks on bodies and routines rather than in headlines.