A mystery fan, I am inspired by detectives who uncover those who benefit from a crime. The developing world is facing unprecedented debt and development crises that reveal new “crimes against humanity.” Who benefits from these atrocities?

Progress and setbacks

The United Nations July 14-18 Sustainable Development Goals Report 2025 showed some progress with 100 million children gaining access to education, reductions of maternal and child mortality, and hundreds of millions with safe water, sanitation and electricity.

Tragically, progress is fragile and unequal. Over 800 million people live in extreme poverty. Hunger affects 1 in 11 globally. Some 1.12 billion live in slums or settlements, and 120 million are forcibly displaced, more than double the number in 2015. Women, persons with disabilities and marginalized communities face systemic disadvantage. Conflicts and climate chaos compound the situation.

Africa’s acute burden

The consequences are particularly acute in Africa where public debt has been growing faster than GDP since 2013. Approximately 57% of the continent’s population—751 million people, including nearly 288 million children—are living in extreme poverty.

To meet soaring obligations to creditors, debt-distressed countries are sacrificing investments in education, healthcare, infrastructure, and climate resilience. The result is rising poverty, malnutrition and illness. Development assistance has declined dramatically, resulting in an erosion of hope.

Papal calls for justice

Pope Francis warned, “Inequality is the root of social ills” (Evangelii Gaudium, §202). He calls for “…a better kind of politics, one truly at the service of the common good” (Fratelli Tutti, §154).

His Laudato Si’ showed that “The human environment and the natural environment affect the most vulnerable people on the planet” (§49).

He declared, “Where justices abound and growing numbers of people are deprived of basic human rights and considered expendable, the principle of the common good…becomes a summons to solidarity and a preferential option for the poorest of our brothers and sisters” (§158).

Calls for new structures

The 2024 meeting of the Institute for Policy Development at Columbia University and the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences on “Addressing the Debt Crises in the Global South,” concluded:

“In order to break the debt-financing cycle, it is necessary to create a multinational mechanism, based on solidarity and harmony among peoples…a new international financial architecture that is bold and creative.”

The 2025 Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences Jubilee Report: A Blueprint for Tackling the Debt and Development Crisis and Creating the Financial Foundations for a Sustainable People-Centered Economy agrees:

“The international financial system…reflects and reinforces deep structural asymmetries between developing and advanced economies… The goal is not mere stabilization. It is structural transformation.”

Gaza’s urgent suffering

For nearly two years, people in Gaza have faced death by airstrikes, tanks and bullets. Today, there is a “slaughter of the innocents” from starvation.

On July 27, Pope Leo XIV’s “heartfelt appeal for a ceasefire” prayed for the population of Gaza who were being “crushed by hunger and continues to be exposed to violence and death.”

The situation is urgent and needs prayer, practical assistance, and political advocacy for true economic and social reform. Now.

• Nuala Kenny is a Sister of Charity in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and a pediatrician. An officer of the Order of Canada since 1999, she has published several books, including Healing the Church (Novalis, 2012) and Rediscovering the Art of Dying (2017). She is co-author of Still Unhealed: Treating the Pathology in the Clergy Sexual Abuse Crisis (Novalis and Twenty-Third Publications, 2019). She most recently published A Post-Pandemic Church: Prophetic Possibilities (Novalis and Twenty-Third Publications, 2021).