The Green Finance and Development Center at Fudan University in Shanghai published on 21 March 2022 a study titled "Brief: China's Role in Public External Debt in DSSI Countries and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2020" by Mengdi Yue and Christoph Nedopil Wang.
The study looks at 68 countries, most of them in Africa, eligible under the debt service suspension initiative (DSSI). It is estimated that 26 percent of the total debt service paid by the 68 DSSI countries in 2022 would go to China, compared to 17 percent to bondholders and 9 percent to the World Bank-IDA.
The five countries experiencing the highest percentage change in outstanding public external debt to China between 2019 and 2020 were Guinea (95 %), Lesotho (60 %), Burkina Faso (55 %), Sierra Leone (43 %) and Rwanda (33 %).
