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The IMF Town Hall in Bangkok
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Africa Is Not Overrepresented: The IMF Town Hall in Bangkok

Oct 27, 2026 · Shady Hassan 

Oct 27, 2026 · Shady Hassan 

MENA fem movement 

Center for Global Affairs, Badr University in Cairo, Egypt 

 

The question and the answer

At the IMF Managing Director’s town hall with civil society in Bangkok on 12 October 2026, Africa Kiiza of Christian Aid asked the question the Global South has been asking for eighty years. Taking Kenya as his example, he said an African’s voice at the Fund is “thirty times weaker” than a Briton’s or a German’s. He asked how Kristalina Georgieva would support a quota review that redistributes power, not one that simply passes shares to the large emerging economies.

Her answer is on the IMF’s own recording: “The IMF adopted a long time ago a principle for how votes are distributed that is very straightforward. It is share of country in the world economy.” Then came the line that should stay on the record: “Actually, Africa as a whole, if you take this principle, is overrepresented, not underrepresented.” The best the Fund can do for Africa, she said, is “support you for your economy to grow.”

This answer is tone-deaf. It justifies neo-colonial dominance over Africa. It tells a room of African civil society that their continent already has more than it deserves, and that a voice must be earned on the terms of those who already hold power. It is the colonial logic that runs through the IMF and the whole financial architecture, said out loud.

Overrepresented by whose yardstick?

Overrepresented compared with what? Sub-Saharan Africa is home to 14.3 percent of the world’s people and holds 4.6 percent of the votes at the IMF. The advanced economies are home to 13.6 percent of the world’s people and hold 59.1 percent of the votes. The Fund’s own formula hands them 61.4 percent of quota shares while they produce 40.3 percent of world output at purchasing-power parity (Merling and Kring 2023, p. 8). Measure the world economy at purchasing-power parity, and it is the rich who are overrepresented.

And the yardstick is the trick. GDP is built around what is bought and sold. It does not count the 16.4 billion hours of unpaid care work done every day, three quarters of it by women, worth about 9 percent of world GDP (ILO 2018). It counts a forest when it is cut down and sold, not while it stands and holds the soil, the water and the carbon. Even the review on the economics of biodiversity that the UK Treasury commissioned from Partha Dasgupta found GDP “based on a faulty application of economics” that leaves out the “depreciation of assets” such as the degradation of the biosphere (University of Cambridge 2021).

So the ways of living that keep communities and the planet alive score zero, and the extraction that destroys them scores as growth. This formula benefits Western firms and destroys our planet. Africa emits less carbon per person than any other region, yet it is measured with the ruler of those who burned the planet, and then told it has too much say. That is gaslighting.

Rigged since 1944

None of this is an accident. The first quota formula was written backwards. In 1943 Harry Dexter White at the US Treasury gave his economist Raymond Mikesell the answers before the sums: about $2.9 billion for the United States, about half that for Britain, about $10 billion in all, and a ranking of the Big Four wartime allies already agreed by the President and the Secretary of State. Britain was counted “including its colonies”. Mikesell admitted it in his memoir: “I confess to having exercised a certain amount of freedom in making these estimates in order to achieve the predetermined quotas.” The formula was hidden from the delegates: “The quota formula was not distributed, and White asked me not to reveal it.” And: “I tried to make the process appear as scientific as possible, but the delegates were intelligent enough to know that the process was more political than scientific” (Mikesell 1994, pp. 22, 35–36).

The winners of the Second World War built a system to serve themselves, counted their colonies’ wealth as their own, and dressed it up as science. More than eighty years later, the Managing Director calls the same principle “very straightforward”.

The neutrality fiction

She said nothing about who actually steers the Fund. Washington does not even hide it. The US Treasury’s July 2025 report to Congress states: “The IFIs are a cost-effective means to further U.S. foreign policy and national security interests.” It says “The United States uses its shareholding, voice on the governing bodies, and convening power” to shape them, and it lists the returns: “opening new markets for U.S. exports and investment” and, on Africa, “developing and opening African markets for U.S. businesses”. It records “a 16.5 percent voting share, the only individual member with a voting share above the IMF veto threshold of 15 percent”, and adds: “Because the United States holds a 17.4 percent quota share, the quota increase is not effective without our consent” (US Treasury 2025, pp. 3, 9, 22).

Europe defends the same arrangement. Explaining its vote on the Sevilla Commitment in August 2025, the EU defended the existing system “with the independence, expertise and financing capacity of the IMF and the World Bank at its core”, and warned that a UN process risked “splintering and fragmenting the architecture rather than uniting it or filling gaps” (EEAS 2025). Meanwhile the G24, close to 40 percent of the world’s people, holds 20.4 percent of the votes (Merling and Kring 2023, p. 9). I have called this the neutrality fiction (Hassan 2026).

To lecture African civil society about votes without one word about any of this is to expect us in that room to be totally ignorant of the facts and of the bias in today’s international order. The tools of Western domination over the Earth’s resources gaslight us, and expect us to believe they work in our interest.

What the answer should have been

She took pride in the third chair for sub-Saharan Africa on the Executive Board. Since 1 November 2024, three chairs speak for “the 45 Sub-Saharan Africa member countries” (IMF 2024). The United States has a chair to itself, and a veto. A seat at the table is not a vote that counts.

Her promise to “never ever allow a low-income country to lose shares” guards the floor; it does not lift it. The last review gave “an increase in quotas of 50 percent, allocated to members in proportion to their current quotas” (IMF 2023a). Everyone grew by the same proportion, and the order of power did not move. The Board of Governors then asked for “possible approaches as a guide for further quota realignment, including through a new quota formula” by June 2025 (IMF 2023b). Sixteen months past that deadline, Africa was told to grow first.

An honest answer would have said three things. The formula must count people, not only dollars. It must count the care and the nature that keep our societies alive. And no single country should hold a veto over everyone else.

Calling Africa overrepresented is a slap to any rational thinker who believes in equality for all. Africa is not overrepresented. It is outvoted, by design, since 1944.

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