Hundreds of activists stage demand “Stop the harm! Cancel the Debt! Reparations and Just Transition Now!” in a protest march in Mendiola, Manila on October 16, 2025. 

The protest is in time for the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) in Washington DC, USA.

Other protests are held in at least 50 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America in a Global Day of Coordinated Mobilizations, holding the IMF, WB, and G7 countries accountable for the debt, economic, and climate crisis.   

The demonstration brings together campaigners and activists from Oriang National Women’s Movement,  Kilusan para sa Kabuhayan Kalusugan Kalikasan at Katiyakan sa Paninirahan, Sanlakas, Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino,  Philippine Movement for Climate Justice. Aniban ng Manggagawa sa Agrikultura, Freedom from Debt Coalition, Zone One Tondo Organization, and the regional Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD).

APMDD said, in a press release, the mobilization calls out “corruption as a systemic problem, requiring systemic solutions.”

The protest also highlighted shared demands for “debt cancellation and an end to austerity loan conditions, which are pushed especially upon cash-strapped countries in the Global South, stopping fossil-fuel lending, providing grants-based climate finance, payment of reparations for historical and continuing destruction, and for a Just Transition.”

“Asia and other regions of the Global South report unprecedented public debt levels and mounting debt servicing costs,” APMDD said.

Citing a report from  UNCTAD, APMDD said “the public debt of developing countries swelled twice as fast as that of Global North economies since 2010, reaching $31 trillion by 2024. High interest costs saw $921 billion in interest payments alone in 2024. South and Southeast Asian countries, such as Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and the Philippines, saw public and publicly guaranteed foreign debts rising to more than half of their total external debt in 2023.”

APMDD Coordinator Lidy Nacpil said“the IMF and the World Bank remain key actors of the G7, the world’s richest countries, in worsening the climate and debt catastrophes. It is high time for these institutions to stop peddling more debts as solutions to crises, including the climate emergency caused by rich countries, and imposing their neoliberal policies and conditionalities of privatization and trade liberalization that violate people’s rights and intensify the climate emergency, while ensuring massive profits for big business.” 

Atty. Luke Espiritu, President of Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino (BMP), scored how international financial institutions have “supported political dynasties compliant with their neoliberal interests and directions.”

“The poor, especially the workers, have long been victimized by the IMF-World Bank through its policies that promote inequality and increased poverty. These financial institutions are stewards of the neo-liberal system that only enriched the Global North at the expense of the people in the Global South.  Let us not forget that the IMF, the World Bank, and the G7, particularly the US, play significant roles in nurturing political dynasties compliant with their dictates,” he said.

He added: “We need to transform this greed and profit-driven economic and financial systems and structures being sustained and promoted by the IMF-World Bank and create a system that is sustainable, gender-just, and equitable.”

Photos by JIMMY A DOMINGO / Mata: Asia Press Photo