Africa’s First Pandemic Default Tests New Effort to Ease Debt From China

A new framework to resolve debt crises in developing countries, meant to ensure that Chinese and private creditors share the burden of providing relief, faces a key test after Zambia became the first African nation to default during the coronavirus pandemic.

Finance ministers from the Group of 20 major economies said Nov. 13 that they had come up with a new process for restructuring the debts of the world’s poorest countries, which now owe billions of dollars to Chinese state-owned lenders and Western fund managers that snapped…