Climate Debt, Colonial Debt, and Repair (25 minutes)
What We are Owed
What We are Owed
Climate Debt, Colonial Debt, and Repair (25 minutes)
Across Africa, debt arrives as a predatory loan with a three-hour turnaround, a landlord's eviction notice carried alongside an unpaid balance, a grandmother's empty granary still packed with groceries for the journey home.
It is the daily arithmetic of a global financial system designed, as one voice in this episode puts it, to reproduce colonial hierarchies under new names.
In this episode, we trace debt's many scales: from the climate reparations the Global North owes the African continent, to the structural adjustment conditions that hollowed out public services, to the household calculations of women building businesses in Dar es Salaam, to the predatory green finance arriving in the Rift Valley dressed as solidarity.
What emerges across these testimonies is an indictment, and a reckoning. The continent that accounts for less than 4% of historic global emissions bears the sharpest edge of the climate emergency. The communities that built their own water infrastructure now watch governments tax them for access to it. The farmers who fed cities are squeezed by brokers before their produce reaches any market.
And yet, threaded through every account is something that refuses the logic of extraction: a food sovereignty movement rising across the continent, young organizers naming hope as an act of resistance, and the stubborn ritual of a grandmother who, in the third year of the worst drought of her life, sends a motorbike to buy potatoes and tomatoes for the road.
"You need the food much more than I need the money," she says to her grandson.
Executive Producer Wangui Kimari Creative Director Jim Chuchu Producer Njeri Gitungo Country Productions Ajabu Ajabu / The Photo House Research Lead Brock Hicks Project Communications Cynthia Kemunto Post Production Africa Post Office (APO) Post Production Supervisor Carole Kinyua Editors Gloria Ndiritu Supervising Editor Jim Chuchu
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