UN Special Rapporteur to take testimonies to IMF and World Bank into a new report
Bangkok, 14 October 2026. While finance ministers met at the IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings, people paying the price for those institutions’ policies gave evidence of their own a few streets away. At the People’s Inequality Hearing, hosted by the Fight Inequality Alliance, activists from Pakistan, Zambia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Ecuador and Kenya described how loan conditions and austerity are driving up the cost of living and stripping away public services.
In Pakistan, petrol has risen from Rs 268 to Rs 398 a litre in a year, with around Rs 85 of every litre collected as a levy tied to the country’s IMF programme. A scholarship scheme that put more than 505,000 students through university was cut without warning. “I want the IMF and World Bank to stop making the children pay the debts they lent to our ruling elite,” said Ali Raza, a student organiser from Lahore. “I have never seen this debt being spent on the public, but every day I see ordinary people paying it back.”
In Ecuador, debt has risen 700% since the government returned to the IMF in 2019. Removing the diesel subsidy pushed the basic family food basket to $800 a month against a minimum wage of $482. At least 22 people were killed during protests against IMF-backed measures. “We declare that these debts, imposed on us even before we were born, do not belong to us,” said Tamia Maldonado.
“We were never even counted by the World Bank as project-affected people,” said Anora Madrid, whose community of more than 23,000 people at Smokey Mountain, Manila, faces a World Bank-backed USD 500 million incinerator. “How can we enjoy the right to development when everything is being taken away from us?”
“Our living space is not something to be sold like a commodity, our land is not yours! Yogyakarta is not for sale!” said Sana Ullaili, from Yogyakarta, Indonesia, where her community has been opposing a 300 million USD project focused on tourism in Yogyakarta.
“No debt policy should force a mother to choose between food and medicine, deny a child an education, or send a girl on a long and dangerous walk to fetch water,” said Mercy Mary Nakawala from Nakonde, Zambia speaking ahead of negotiations on a new IMF deal in the country.
Kenyan poet and organiser Wanjira Hezron Ruriga (Cricket Writes), who helped force the withdrawal of Kenya’s 2024 Finance Bill, said: “If decisions are made about our lives, our voices must be present where those decisions are made.”
A panel responded:
Prof Surya Deva, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to development, said: “I had access to the other side of the road, inside the IMF and World Bank meetings. I found it more valuable to be here, listening to these testimonies. This is where participation should be happening: at the centre of the discussions. Our own governments are not listening to the 99%. So we have to ask: development for whom?” He has requested meetings with the IMF and World Bank, and said the testimonies will form part of a forthcoming report on the two institutions.
Prof Kate Pickett said: “I promise to bring all your voices into the development of the International Panel on Inequality.”
Prof Grieve Chelwa said: “Creditors call on their governments to be democratic, but the IMF and World Bank are an anti-democratic, anti-people machine. When anti-democratic governments get re-elected, the IMF and World Bank are the first to congratulate them. People die because of their policies. I will take forward the message that these institutions need to be dismantled.”
The hearing closed with a People’s Verdict: that the legacy institutions the IMF and World Bank are guilty of deepening inequality, robbing the poor of their rights, and not fit being for the future.
ENDS
Notes to editors
Full testimonies, photos and interviews available on request.
Fight Inequality Alliance is a growing global movement organising and mobilising to counter the excessive concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a small elite. FIA unites a wide range of social movements, grassroots and community-based organisations, civil society organisations, trade unions, artists and individual activists from across the world who share a vision and purpose in fighting the structural causes of inequality together. It is currently calling for action on the cost of living around the world https://fightinequality.org/your-cost-of-living-is-rising-fast-governments-must-act