Africa and the Global South: Beyond Solidarity Rhetoric, What the Coalition Actually Means

The term “Global South” has become one of the most used and least examined phrases in contemporary international relations. It appears in AU summit communiqués, UN General Assembly speeches, academic journals, and newspaper editorials with a frequency that suggests consensus on its meaning. That consensus is largely illusory. The Global South is not a defined institution, a formal alliance, a shared ideology, or a coherent economic bloc. It is a political shorthand for a diverse collection of countries that share a historical experience of colonialism and marginalisation in the Western-designed international order, and that are increasingly asserting the right to shape that order’s next iteration on terms more favourable to their own interests.

For Africa, the Global South framing matters because it provides the continent with a discursive and sometimes institutional home for its demands: for debt restructuring, for climate finance, for permanent UN Security Council representation, for fairer trade arrangements, and for a global governance architecture that reflects a twenty-first century distribution of power rather than a 1945 settlement. But the framing also carries risks that African analysts and policymakers need to take seriously. The Global South’s two most powerful members, China and India, are not simply fellow developing countries with aligned interests. They are major powers with their own geopolitical agendas, their own competitive relationships with Africa, and their own conceptions of what the reformed global order should look like that do not automatically coincide with African needs.^[1]

Understanding what the Global South coalition actually offers Africa, as distinct from what its rhetoric promises, requires examining the specific institutions and mechanisms through which Global South solidarity is expressed: BRICS, the G77, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the various South-South cooperation frameworks that have multiplied over the past decade. It requires asking, with honesty, where those institutions have delivered for Africa and where they have reproduced the asymmetric dynamics they claim to oppose.

What the Global South Actually Is

The concept has roots in the Cold War’s Third World non-alignment movement and gained renewed currency after the 2008 global financial crisis demonstrated the limitations of the Western-designed financial architecture. The Bandung Conference of 1955, at which Asian and African nations articulated a vision of international solidarity outside the superpower blocs, is the most cited historical antecedent.^[2] But the contemporary Global South is a considerably more heterogeneous formation than Bandung’s founding vision suggested.

It encompasses China, the world’s second largest economy and a permanent UN Security Council member whose trade surpluses with developing countries often reproduce the extractive dynamics it criticises in Western relationships with the Global South. It includes India, a rising power whose foreign policy is simultaneously non-aligned in rhetoric and strategically calibrated in practice, maintaining partnerships with the United States, Russia, and the Gulf states that would have been inconceivable to the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement. It includes Brazil, whose Global South commitments have varied dramatically with its domestic political cycle, and Turkey, which is simultaneously a NATO member and a regular participant in Global South forums.

And it includes Africa, which contributes fifty-four of the UN’s 193 member states, holds the world’s largest concentration of critical minerals, and contains the fastest-growing population on Earth, but whose share of global GDP remains below 3 percent and whose institutional weight in Global South forums is consistently below what its numbers would suggest.^[3] The gap between Africa’s demographic and resource weight on the one hand and its institutional influence on the other is one of the most consequential and least-discussed structural features of the Global South coalition.

54	African member states in the UN, the largest single continental bloc in the General Assembly UN membership 2025 — Africa’s voting weight is its most underutilised geopolitical asset

 

6	African countries in BRICS or BRICS+ as of 2025: South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Algeria (invited), and Senegal (invited) BRICS Johannesburg Declaration 2023 / BRICS+ expansion — the largest African presence in any major multilateral economic forum

 

134	Countries in the G77, the UN’s largest negotiating bloc, the institutional core of Global South collective bargaining G77 membership 2025 — includes all African states; chaired by an African country on a rotating basis

 BRICS and Africa: Partnership or New Dependency?

What Johannesburg 2023 actually meant.

The 2023 BRICS summit in Johannesburg was the first held on African soil and produced the bloc’s most significant expansion since its formation, admitting six new members including three African countries: Egypt, Ethiopia, and the UAE (the latter being a Gulf state rather than a developing country in the conventional sense).^[4] Nigeria and Algeria received partnership invitations, and Senegal has engaged with the BRICS+ framework. The expansion was widely interpreted as a signal that the bloc was becoming a serious alternative to Western-dominated multilateral institutions.

The more sober analysis is that BRICS’s expansion reflects the bloc’s desire to increase its geopolitical weight, its resource access, and its diplomatic legitimacy, rather than a strategic commitment to African development. The three African members admitted in 2023 are the continent’s largest economies and most geopolitically significant states. Their inclusion strengthens BRICS’s claim to global representation. What BRICS offers them in return is less clear.

The New Development Bank, BRICS’s multilateral development finance institution, has approved projects in Africa, but its total lending portfolio remains modest relative to the African Development Bank, the World Bank’s Africa operations, or China’s bilateral lending through its policy banks.^[5] The BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement, designed as an alternative to IMF emergency liquidity, has never been activated for an African member and lacks the institutional capacity and funding depth to substitute for IMF programmes in a serious fiscal crisis. The bloc’s push to reduce dollar dependence and develop alternative payment systems has potential relevance for Africa’s chronic dollar-shortage problem, but concrete progress on that agenda has been slower than the rhetoric surrounding it suggests.

China within the Global South: partner or patron?

China’s centrality to the Global South’s institutional architecture creates a structural tension that African analysts are increasingly, if cautiously, naming. China presents itself as the Global South’s most powerful advocate and as proof that developing countries can achieve great power status within a reformed international order. That narrative is genuinely compelling and has significant purchase across African political and intellectual circles.^[6]

But China’s trade relationship with Africa reproduces, in structural terms, the pattern that Global South rhetoric identifies as a defining feature of Western exploitation: China imports African raw materials and exports manufactured goods, generating a trade dynamic in which value addition accumulates in China rather than in Africa. China’s lending to African governments, as analysed in Day 18, has created debt obligations whose opacity and commercial terms have complicated African fiscal sovereignty in ways that are structurally similar to, even if politically distinct from, the IMF conditionality that the Global South critique targets. A coalition in which the most powerful member replicates the economic dynamics its political rhetoric condemns requires more honest examination than most Global South commentary provides. 

“The Global South is a genuine aspiration and a useful diplomatic formation. It is not yet a reliable vehicle for African interests. The difference between the two matters enormously for how African governments invest their diplomatic capital.” Africa & Global Power  —  Day 28 Editorial Position

 Where the Global South Has Actually Delivered for Africa

The honest assessment requires acknowledging what the Global South coalition has genuinely achieved for Africa alongside its limitations. Three areas stand out as concrete rather than rhetorical advances.

Climate finance is the most significant. The African bloc within the G77 and the broader Global South coalition has been the most consistent and most effective advocate for the principle that wealthy countries, which are historically responsible for the bulk of cumulative carbon emissions, must finance climate adaptation and mitigation in developing countries that have contributed least to the problem but face its worst consequences. The Loss and Damage Fund established at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh in 2022, and the decisions at COP28 to operationalise it with initial contributions, represent a genuine victory for African and Global South negotiating positions that had been resisted by wealthy countries for decades.^[7]

SDR reallocation is the second concrete advance. The African Group’s push, supported by broader Global South coordination, for the reallocation of unused Special Drawing Rights from wealthy IMF members to developing countries produced a partial but meaningful response: the IMF’s Resilience and Sustainability Trust, capitalised partly through SDR rechannelling, provides longer-term concessional finance for African governments facing climate and pandemic-related fiscal pressures.^[8] It is an incomplete victory. African demands for a much larger reallocation have not been met. But it demonstrates that coordinated Global South pressure can shift multilateral institution policy in ways that bilateral advocacy cannot.

Vaccine equity during the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates both the potential and the limits of Global South solidarity. The COVAX facility’s failures, which left African countries at the back of the vaccine queue while wealthy countries accumulated surplus doses, produced a unified African and Global South critique that shaped subsequent WHO reform discussions and the negotiations toward a pandemic treaty that would include more equitable access provisions.^[9] The critique was legitimate and well-organised. The structural change it produced was modest. The pattern of Global South advocacy producing rhetorical concessions rather than structural reforms is one that African negotiators have learnt to navigate with increasing sophistication but have not yet found a way to break.

 

The Iran War and Global South Fracture Lines

Day 27’s analysis of the Iran war’s impact on Africa illustrated a specific Global South fracture that deserves further examination here. The war has divided the Global South’s major members along lines that reveal the coalition’s structural limits as a vehicle for collective African interests. China, Iran’s most important economic partner, has called for a ceasefire while maintaining its commercial relationships with Tehran. India, which imports Iranian oil and has complex ties with both Iran and the US, has adopted a position of studied neutrality.^[10] Russia, a BRICS member, has supported Iran diplomatically. The Gulf states, which participate in various South-South cooperation forums, are actively pressing African governments to align against Iran.

This is not a coalition speaking with one voice on behalf of developing countries. It is a collection of major and middle powers pursuing their own interests within a shared rhetorical frame. African governments watching this dynamic from Abuja, Addis Ababa, and Cairo are drawing rational conclusions: the Global South is a useful forum for specific, bounded objectives, particularly in multilateral negotiations where numbers matter and where African votes have aggregate weight. It is not a reliable security community, an economic union, or a framework within which Africa’s specific interests will be systematically prioritised over those of more powerful members.

 

 

 

Verdict: Africa Needs the Global South, But Not as a Substitute for Its Own Agenda.

The Global South is a genuine and valuable formation for Africa, provided African governments approach it with clear eyes about what it is and what it is not. It is a forum in which Africa’s numerical weight in the UN system can be leveraged for concrete multilateral outcomes, as the climate finance and SDR reallocation advances demonstrate. It is a diplomatic community that provides African states with an alternative to binary alignment between Washington and Beijing. And it is a shared historical narrative that has genuine resonance for African populations who understand colonialism and marginalisation as lived experiences rather than academic concepts.

What the Global South is not is a vehicle through which China, India, or Brazil will prioritise African development interests over their own. The New Development Bank will not replace the IMF for African states in fiscal crisis. BRICS membership will not resolve Africa’s terms-of-trade problem with China. And Global South solidarity will not produce the permanent UN Security Council seat, the sovereign debt resolution mechanism, or the climate finance at scale that Africa actually needs, unless African governments bring the specific demands and the specific coalitions necessary to produce those outcomes to the table themselves.^[1]

The most important strategic implication of this analysis is that Africa’s effective participation in the Global South requires, paradoxically, a stronger and more distinctly African diplomatic agenda rather than absorption into a generic developing-country framework. The AU’s Common Position on UN reform, the African Group’s coordinated climate negotiating position, and the African bloc’s collective bargaining at WTO and IMF governance discussions are the most effective expressions of African power within Global South forums precisely because they are specific, coordinated, and grounded in concrete African interests rather than in general anti-Western sentiment. Building more of that capacity is the work of the next decade. The Global South provides the stage. Africa must write its own lines.

 

 

REFERENCES

 

[1]  African Union Commission / UNCTAD (2025). Africa in the Global South: Assets, Asymmetries, and Strategic Options [54-vote UN weight; resource endowment share; institutional influence gap; China-Africa trade structure; Global South vs African agenda distinction]. https://au.int/en/documents/africa-global-south-strategic-options-2025

[2]  Brautigam, D. / Bandung Spirit Project (2024). From Bandung to BRICS: The Evolving Architecture of Global South Solidarity [1955 Bandung origins; Non-Aligned Movement evolution; contemporary heterogeneity; China and India within the formation]. https://www.bandungspirit.org/from-bandung-to-brics-2024

[3]  World Bank / IMF (2025). Global GDP Distribution and Institutional Representation [Africa GDP below 3% of global; G20 representation; G77 voting dynamics; demographic vs economic weight gap]. https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/global-economic-prospects-2025

[4]  BRICS Secretariat (2023). Johannesburg Declaration: Expansion and New Member Admission [Egypt, Ethiopia, UAE, Argentina, Iran, Saudi Arabia admission; BRICS+ framework; Africa hosting significance; NDB capitalisation update]. https://www.brics2023.co.za/johannesburg-declaration

[5]  New Development Bank (2025). Annual Report 2024: Africa Portfolio [NDB Africa lending volume; comparison with AfDB and World Bank; CRA activation history; dollar alternatives progress; NDB capitalisation constraints]. https://www.ndb.int/annual-report-2024

[6]  Pilling, D. / Financial Times (2024). China’s Role in the Global South: Patron or Partner? [trade structure China-Africa; raw material import vs manufactured export dynamic; BRI debt; Global South rhetorical vs structural alignment]. https://www.ft.com/content/china-global-south-patron-partner-2024

[7]  UNFCCC / African Group of Negotiators (2023). Loss and Damage Fund: COP27 Outcome and African Negotiating Record [Sharm el-Sheikh agreement; African bloc coordination; decade of advocacy; COP28 operationalisation; initial contributions]. https://unfccc.int/loss-and-damage-fund-cop27

[8]  IMF (2023). Resilience and Sustainability Trust: Design, African Access, and SDR Rechannelling [RST capitalisation; SDR reallocation partial success; African eligibility; comparison with full reallocation demands; G77 advocacy record]. https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/Resilience-and-Sustainability-Trust

[9]  WHO / African Union (2022). COVID-19 Vaccine Equity: COVAX Failure, African Critique, and Pandemic Treaty Implications [COVAX distribution failures; surplus hoarding; African Union vaccine manufacturing initiative; WHO reform advocacy; pandemic treaty negotiations]. https://www.who.int/publications/covid-vaccine-equity-africa-2022

[10]  Council on Foreign Relations (2026). Global South Fractures: Iran War Positions of China, India, Russia, and African States [BRICS member divergence; Gulf state pressure; African UNGA vote split; coalition limits under geopolitical stress]. https://www.cfr.org/report/global-south-fractures-iran-war-2026