This webpage offers a country-by-country accounting of the Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) participants and the amounts suspended and potentially could be suspended, based on information from the World Bank’s International Debt Statistics (IDS) database. Data on debt stocks and debt-service payments are available on an annual as well as monthly basis.
Please consult the Q&A page for more information.
Overview
COVID-19 has dealt a major blow to world’s poorest countries, causing a recession in 2020 that is estimated to have pushed more than 100 million people into extreme poverty.
At the start of the pandemic, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund urged the G20 to set up the DSSI. Established in May 2020, the DSSI helped countries concentrate their resources on fighting the pandemic and safeguarding the lives and livelihoods of millions of the most vulnerable people. Forty-eight out of 73 eligible countries participated in the initiative before it expired at the end of December 2021. From May 2020 to December 2021, the initiative suspended $12.9 billion in debt-service payments owed by participating countries to their creditors, according to the latest estimates.
The G20 has also called on private creditors to participate in the initiative on comparable terms. Regrettably, only one private creditor participated.
The World Bank and the IMF supported the implementation of the DSSI—by monitoring spending, enhancing public debt transparency, and ensuring prudent borrowing. DSSI borrowers committed to use freed-up resources to increase social, health, or economic spending in response to the crisis. They pledged to disclose all public sector financial commitments (involving debt and debt-like instruments). They also committed to limit their non-concessional borrowing under the IMF arrangements and the World Bank’s Sustainable Development Finance Policy.
