Are We Balancing Budgets at Children’s Expense?

Tamara Tutnjevic reflects on why the Financing for Development agenda must confront a critical blind spot: the impact of debt on children.

April 22, 2026.

As global leaders convene for the Financing for Development Forum, the focus will, predictably, centre on debt sustainability, fiscal space and investment flows. These are necessary conversations. But they are not sufficient. If a country is meeting its debt obligations while failing its children, can we still call that stability?

This is the uncomfortable question underpinning today’s financing landscape and it remains largely absent from the room.

We enter this Forum at a moment of acute fiscal compression. Global Official Development Assistance fell to USD 174.3 billion in 2025 a 23.1% drop, the largest annual contraction on record. Bilateral aid declined sharply, alongside humanitarian funding. These are not marginal adjustments. They signal a systemic contraction in the very resources that sustain basic services for children.

At the same time, many governments are increasing allocations to debt servicing, often under significant external pressure. The trade-offs are immediate and visible. Classrooms grow more crowded. Health systems weaken. Protection services recede. Yet in macroeconomic discussions, these outcomes are rarely treated as indicators of instability.

Debt is being repaid today by children who never borrowed a cent.

Through our work with communities, the implications are clear and deeply human. Lameck, a 13-year-old student at Kagunje Primary School in, studies in a classroom of over a thousand learners, with desks for fewer than 70. For years, he sat on the floor, writing on his lap.

“I used to write on my lap. If someone bumped into me, my letters would turn out messy and nothing like the clear writing of a doctor.

The absence of something as basic as a desk was not a minor inconvenience. It quietly eroded his confidence and disrupted his learning.

“Lack of desks at this school was holding back my dream of becoming a doctor.”

Only after desks were provided did that trajectory begin to shift.

“I now write clearly and neatly. Every day, my handwriting gets closer to what a doctor’s should be.”

Lameck’s experience is not an outlier. It reflects how structural underinvestment translates into everyday barriers small, cumulative constraints that shape a child’s sense of possibility.

These patterns are reinforced at scale. Bilateral aid to least developed countries has fallen by over 25%, including in regions where children represent nearly half the population. As António Guterres has warned,

"As I look across the spectrum of global challenges, one truth becomes unmistakably clear:  our systems of global problem-solving face a reckoning".

Children are underfunded by design, not accident

Despite representing 46% of the population in aid-recipient countries, children receive just 5% of aid in programmes directly targeting their needs, with a further 7% indirectly benefiting them, according to World Vision’s Putting Children First for Sustainable Development.

When fiscal space tightens, this imbalance deepens. Children are not a protected budget line. They are, instead, an adjustment variable. This is where the Financing for Development agenda must evolve. Debt is too often framed as a technical challenge centred on repayment capacity, market confidence and risk management. These metrics matter. But they are incomplete. They tell us whether a country can meet its obligations, not whether it is investing in its future.

Children offer a more honest measure. Their wellbeing reflects whether systems are delivering for people, not just for creditors. When children are excluded from education, lack access to healthcare or face increased exposure to violence, the consequences are not only immediate. They are intergenerational, shaping productivity, stability and social cohesion for decades to come.

A false economy at the heart of fiscal policy

From a financing perspective, the logic is clear. Every USD 1 invested in child-focused development generates up to USD 10 in social and economic returns. These gains extend beyond individual outcomes strengthening communities and long-term economic resilience. Cutting such investments to service debt may improve short-term fiscal indicators, but it weakens future stability. This is not discipline. It is deferral transferring costs into the future, often at a higher price.

Encouragingly, discussions within the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank increasingly reference the need to protect social spending. Yet without explicit, enforceable commitments, children remain at risk of being overlooked in practice.

What this Forum must deliver

This Forum presents a critical opportunity to recalibrate not through new rhetoric, but through more precise commitments.

• First, debt sustainability frameworks must incorporate child-sensitive indicators, moving beyond aggregate social spending to assess real outcomes for children.
• Second, debt restructuring agreements should include explicit safeguards for investments in health, education and child protection. These are not peripheral sectors. They are foundational to economic resilience.
• Third, donors and international financial institutions must prioritise predictable, long-term financing that reaches children directly, even in constrained fiscal environments.

The question for policymakers is not whether children matter in development. It is whether we are willing to treat their wellbeing as a core measure of economic success.

Because the credibility of the Financing for Development agenda will not be judged solely by balance sheets or communiqués. It will be judged by whether it protects children like Lameck full of ambition and potential, yet with no seat at the table when decisions about their futures are made.

Tamara Tutnjevic is Senior Director of Public Policy and Influence at World Vision, where she leads the organisation’s global advocacy to shape policies that protect and empower vulnerable children and families. With over two decades of experience in international development and human rights, she is recognised for her leadership in advancing women’s and children’s rights, with a particular focus on preventing violence in childhood. Tamara combines evidence-driven insight with practical, solutions-oriented approaches, championing systemic change that safeguards the most vulnerable.