By Mkhululi Chimoio
When South Africa assumed the G20 Presidency on 1 December 2024, it did more than just put on a diplomatic mantle: it acquired a historic chance to reshape global economic and political discourses through an African prism. For the first time, the G20 summit will be held on African soil in Johannesburg on 22-23 November 2025, with the African Union (AU) as a permanent member. This is a moment of immense symbolic weight – but will it translate into substance?
A turning point for global governance
The G20, or Group of Twenty, is an intergovernmental forum bringing together 19 individual countries, the European Union (EU) and the African Union (AU), with a focus on key global economic issues, including international financial stability, climate change mitigation, and sustainable development.
The G20 holds annual meetings of world leaders, and has a rotating presidency drawn from its member states.
South Africa is the first African country ever to lead the G20, at a time when the world is facing a series of overlapping and mutually reinforcing crises, including inequality, poverty, climate change and geopolitical instability. South Africa joined the bloc in 1999, and was the sole African representative until the African Union was granted permanent membership in 2023, adding a further layer of legitimacy and expectation on the continent that .
As Chrispin Phiri, the spokesperson for South Africa’s Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, explained, “The Presidency falls amidst global crises: climate change, poverty, inequalities, unemployment, geopolitical instability, and poor SDG progress, with only 12% of targets on track. South Africa seeks a paradigm shift in global economic policymaking, centered on inequality, sustainable financing, and collective development.”
Phiri recalled that the leadership of South Africa will employ Ubuntu, or the philosophy that “I am because we are” seeking solutions that are inclusive and co-operative and that make certain “no one is left behind”.
The G20 represents about 85 % of global GDP and more than 75 % of world trade, according to the World Trade Organization (WTO). However, Africa’s share of global trade is approximately 2-3%, with exports from the continent largely consisting of raw and semi-processed goods. As the G20 “comes to Africa” the question becomes whether this moment can shift structural trade dynamics or whether African voices will merely be present for the photo-op.
South Africa’s vision: Ubuntu in action
Phiri outlined four flagship priorities under South Africa’s G20 theme, “Solidarity, Equality, and Sustainability”, namely: strengthening disaster resilience and response; ensuring debt sustainability for low-income countries; mobilising finance for a just energy transition and harnessing critical minerals for inclusive growth.
He added that flagship initiatives, such as the G20@20 Review and Cost of Capital Review, would test whether the G20 remains fit for purpose in addressing developing-country challenges.
“Our ‘Critical Minerals Initiative’ promotes investment, beneficiation, and artisanal mining integration to drive Africa’s industrialisation,” noted Phiri.
While South Africa deals with internal challenges-energy shortages, governance reform, and economic instability-the government highlights progress through renewable-energy expansion, institutional strengthening, and diversification into technology, agriculture, and tourism.
These reforms, said Phiri, “underline national resilience, innovation, and readiness for global leadership.”
From Symbolism to Substance: Africa’s Strategic Agenda
Dr. Andrew Edewa, the Director of Standards and SPS Measures at TradeMark Africa, believes that the G20 Presidency in South Africa must be measured through outcomes that advance Africa’s integration into global value chains.
“Africa needs to move from being a raw-material supplier to a value-added manufacturing hub”, he says, adding that priority sectors such as agro-processing, pharmaceuticals, and green minerals need to take root for this value to be actualised.
To Edewa, this entails the need to close a $130–170 billion annual infrastructure gap and unlock $330 billion in SME finance through blended-finance mechanisms and credit guarantees.
He cautions that if Africa’s role in the G20 remains merely symbolic, several serious risks could emerge. These include a loss of trust in multilateral cooperation leading to increased isolation, the stagnation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) due to insufficient technical and financial support, and missed market opportunities. Africa’s consumer spending, for instance, is expected to reach $6.7 trillion by 2030, but this does not reflect in the lives of ordinary people on the continent. He also highlights the spectre of rising youth unemployment, which is already fuelling instability across the continent.
“The G20 must move from symbolic inclusion to concrete action”, Edewa says, adding, “Africa’s participation should lead to resource-backed transformation, green, trade-driven industrialization.”
The World Trade Organisation’s World Trade Report 2024 reinforces Edewa’s concern. While trade volumes expand, the report found that inclusiveness is lacking, and the benefits from this boom remain uneven. Africa’s exports of intermediate goods, as the report shows, rose from US$196 billion in 2019 to US$312 billion in 2022, but this is largely low-value trade. Unless global policies change, the continent is likely to perpetuate dependency rather than break it.
Debt, development, and the IMF view
Debt sustainability is central to South Africa’s G20 agenda. By 2025, the median debt ratio in Sub-Saharan Africa is projected to stabilize at 56% of GDP, according to an IMF spokesperson, but high service costs and declining aid continue to strain fiscal space.
The October 2025 G20 Ministerial Declaration on Debt Sustainability, the IMF spokesperson said, reaffirmed support for helping low- and middle-income countries manage vulnerabilities through restructuring efforts and reforms in domestic revenue mobilization. One such initiative is the G20 Common Framework and Global Sovereign Debt Roundtable, through which Sub-Saharan Africa received US$ 79 million in capacity development support in FY2025 – the highest of any region.
The IMF welcomed the progress that South Africa has made toward strengthened global debt architecture and noted a G20 Framework for Engagement with Africa, which was launched in October 2025, aimed at increasing policy attention and cooperation by global financial institutions.
Civil society: Inclusion or exclusion?
While governments craft high-level frameworks, civil society voices warn that ordinary citizens risk being left out of the G20 process.
The Chair of the Budget Justice Coalition, Matshidiso Lencoasa, criticised the lack of transparency: “Citizens’ voices are not represented in the G20 – it remains an elite forum disconnected from ordinary people. Communities feel excluded and unaware of G20 processes.”
The issues that the G20 has committed to tackling – national debts, education, health, and climate, have direct consequences for citizens, as Lencoasa sees it, but these citizens do not have a say, something that Francina Nkosi of the Climate Justice Coalition, also agrees with.
“Ordinary people, and civil society, are excluded from G20 decision-making”, Nkosi says. “There is no accountability or free, prior, and informed consent.”
Nkosi called for the presidency in South Africa to prioritize education, healthcare, and climate justice through public funding, not austerity. She advocated for renewable energy transitions that include local communities and ensure universal access to clean water and healthcare, rather than making broad and sweeping promises that ultimately amount to nothing.
Labour, gender and the informal economy
The South African labour movement expects the G20 to deliver action, not promises.
“The G20 must keep workers and communities at the centre,” COSATU spokesperson Zanele Sabela said, adding, “Leaders must prove sceptics wrong by acting – creating jobs, promoting fair trade, and delivering relief for vulnerable groups.”
Alexio Musindo, Director of the International Labour Organisation for Southern Africa, said informal work – accounting for 57.7% globally and 34.9% in South Africa – needs to be made more meaningful.
“The G20 Presidency is an opportunity to elevate informal work and decent jobs globally,” Musindo says, calling for policy coherence and social dialogue. “Each African country needs to lead its own formalisation agenda”, he says, “and the proposed G20 Africa Engagement Framework 2026–2030 should further align decent-work goals within the broader continental priorities.”
Diego Lopez Gonzalez of the International Trade Union Confederation, ITUC, said that the presidency of South Africa had strengthened L20 – Labour 20 – participation.
“We saw progress on decent work, social protection, and gender wage equality,” he said, “but stronger references to living wages and fair taxation are needed.”
The International Trade Union Confederation proposed a tripartite Labour and Employment Declaration to institutionalise worker representation in G20 policymaking. At the meeting of L20 members in South Africa on 28-29 July, ITUC General Secretary Luc Triangle stated: “All of us here – trade unions and governments – have the same responsibility: to respond immediately to workers’ everyday problems, to give them the means to take themselves out of poverty, out of informality, precariousness and ensure decent work and decent lives for all.”
Women at the Centre of the Global Economy
Gender inclusion is a test case for whether South Africa’s G20 presidency delivers any substance.
According to Gadifele Ledwaba, the Marketing Executive at Me Time, recovery depends on women’s inclusion in digital and informal economies.
“Substance means tangible outcomes for women-access to markets, finance, and representation,” she said. Her proposals include the Global Women’s Entrepreneurship Fund pooling G20 and private capital, 15 percent of public procurement being directed toward women-owned businesses, and a Women’s Business Ombudsman mechanism for fair access.
Likewise, Bulelani Balabala, founder of the Township Economy Agency, said digitisation of township economies is key, and township enterprises need de-risked investments, access to digital trade platforms, and the recognition within global value chains. “The township economy contributes trillions of rand to the GDP of South Africa”, he points out. “So, if women are to be given equal opportunities in this sector, it will unlock enormous growth.”
Progress and caution
While there is cause for optimism, the World Trade Organization’s Global Trade Outlook & Statistics report for October 2024 predicted that Africa’s exports would increase by only 2.5% (from 5.3% the previous year), and imports would grow by just 1%, reflecting weak demand and constrained financing.
Intra-African trade-a key measure of integration-rose modestly from 11% to 12% in early 2024, according to Ecofin Agency, far below other regions. Unless finance, access to value chains, and structural reforms are taken up by the G20 agenda, there is the risk that the summit might be more symbolic than transformative.
Governance, Power, and global reform
According to political analyst Levy Ndou, South Africa’s G20 role could reassert Africa’s moral and diplomatic voice.
“Our presidency is important for advancing democracy, peace, and human rights-values that South Africa has long championed”, he says, but there is a high likelihood of geopolitical interference from countries within the bloc that could potentially threaten their sovereignty and dent relationships among members.
Joseph Upile Matola of the South African Institute of International Affairs concurs that geopolitics, especially resistance by the U.S. to reform, remains one of the major stumbling blocks.
“South Africa’s domestic instability is less of a barrier than the geopolitical tensions shaping G20 negotiations,” he said.
Matola envisages an opportunity to advance an Africa-centered agenda on debt and cost of capital, building on the pro-Global South priorities carried forward from India in 2023 and Brazil in 2024.
The road ahead: Symbol or Substance?
The stakes are high as the countdown to the Johannesburg Summit in November 2025 begins.
South Africa’s leadership of the G20 embodies a combination of symbolism and substance – the symbolism in hosting the most powerful economies of the world on African soil, and the substance – whether these meetings will produce measurable results for the African continent.
The question now is whether the G20’s engagement with Africa will reshape the world order, or simply reaffirm it.
As Minister Crispin Phiri says, “We are guided by Ubuntu – because we are, the world can be different.”
Mkhululi Chimoio is a South Africa-based solutions-oriented journalist and communications strategist, whose work spans investigative reporting, policy analysis, and advocacy—bringing nuanced insight and impact to both African media and diplomatic initiatives.
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