This piece evaluates whether the G20 Common Framework for Debt Treatments and the IMF-World Bank Low-Income Country Debt Sustainability Framework (LIC-DSF) that feeds it are functioning as designed for the 36 lower-income countries currently in or at high risk of debt distress. It uses completed and stalled restructuring cases (Chad, Zambia, Ghana, Ethiopia) as the test of the system, not the press releases about it.

I cross-referenced net-present-value debt relief figures and restructuring timelines published by the ONE Campaign's debt tracker against the IMF's March 2026 Executive Board paper on macroeconomic prospects in low-income countries, which defines the 70-country PRGT-eligible universe the LIC-DSF governs.

I then checked those outcomes against the methodological critique of the LIC-DSF laid out by IISD's Economic Law and Policy Program and the reform proposals in Carnegie Endowment's February 2026 debt sustainability analysis paper, and used UNDP's August 2025 Ethiopia working paper to sanity-check the on-the-ground restructuring timeline against the official one.

Numbers are reported as found in the source; I did not independently recompute NPV relief.

Four countries applied to the G20 Common Framework: Chad, Zambia, Ghana, Ethiopia. Three finished. Two got anything for it. 3 billion, after a restructuring that took about four years and multiple rounds of what the trade press politely calls "inter-creditor wrangling" and what I'd call creditors testing whether the other creditors would blink first.

Chad completed the process and received a net debt reduction of zero. Ethiopia entered the Common Framework in early 2021 and is, as of this year, still in it — five years and counting, per the on-the-ground reporting UNDP's own working paper corroborates. 6 billion. That's 7%.

The mechanism built to be the emergency room for sovereign debt crises is running at a completion rate that would get a hospital shut down.

Here's the part that should bother you more than the completion rate.

The Framework doesn't operate in isolation — it's downstream of the Low-Income Country Debt Sustainability Framework, the joint IMF-World Bank tool that assigns each of roughly 70 countries a risk rating (low, moderate, high, in distress) which then determines whether they get grants or loans, and whether they get referred toward restructuring at all.

IISD's Economic Law and Policy Program — not a group prone to hyperbole — points out that the LIC-DSF was built in 2006 around a creditor base that barely exists anymore: mostly multilateral and Paris Club lending.

Today's low-income sovereigns carry meaningfully more domestic local-currency debt and non-guaranteed private external debt, categories the framework was never built to weight properly.

IISD's proposed fix is structural, not cosmetic: split the single DSA into a public-fiscal assessment and a separate external-vulnerability assessment, because right now the tool conflates "can the government's budget handle this" with "can the country's foreign-exchange position handle this," and those are not the same question — ask Sri Lanka in 2022 or, per this framework's own logic, ask why Ethiopia's birr crisis and its fiscal position didn't trip the same alarm at the same time.

Carnegie's February 2026 paper adds a second, uglier critique: an optimism bias baked into the baseline growth and fiscal projections, which by construction delays exactly the distress signal the framework exists to generate. A tool with a documented lag in detecting the crisis it's supposed to detect is not a broken smoke alarm.

It's a smoke alarm wired to go off after the room has already burned.

My colleague Sofía Mendoza at FLACSO México, who works on Latin American sovereign debt architecture and has considerably more patience for institutional process than I do, would tell me I'm being uncharitable — that Ghana's completion in under two years is actually the Framework's proof of concept, not its exception. Fine. Ghana is the exception. Zambia took four years.

Chad got nothing. Ethiopia has no end date. A mechanism where your best case is the outlier and your median case is either indefinite limbo or a signature with no money attached isn't a functioning restructuring architecture — it's a waiting room with a suggestion box.

The IMF's own March 2026 paper on the 70 PRGT-eligible countries doesn't dispute any of this; it just doesn't put the completion rate anywhere near the executive summary, which tells you something about which numbers the institution running the tool wants read first.