Rights require money

Talk as much as you like about human rights, nothing will change until the architecture of global finance is reformed

by Attiya Waris BIO

Touts on a matatu bus along Moi Avenue in downtown Nairobi, Kenya, 15 July 2025. Thomas Mukoya/Reuters

is the United Nations independent expert on foreign debt and human rights, and an inaugurated professor of fiscal law at the University of Nairobi School of Law in Kenya. She is the author of Financing Africa (2019) and has advised governments and international institutions on tax, debt and human rights finance across Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.

It streaks past me before I can take it in. Blue and yellow, a stripe of red across its flank, music already swallowed by the exhaust fumes of Limuru Road in Nairobi: the matatu, a kind of minibus, is gone in a second. Another follows almost immediately, its conductor hanging from the open door, calling out destinations to no one in particular. I have been watching this road my whole life. I know exactly what is coming next: another matatu, then another, then a boda boda, a motorcycle taxi, cutting between them, then the long standstill of a jam that could last an hour or end in five minutes. No one can say.

I was six years old the first time I understood that a bus could be something different from matatus and boda bodas. The Kenya Bus Service still ran then. It was a real bus, the kind that could carry 80 people upright without requiring a conductor to shout or a passenger to fold herself into a space the human body was not designed to occupy. I remember looking out of the window at the same road and thinking, without quite having the words for it, that the world felt orderly. That there was a system, and I was inside it.

Matatus at a bus terminus in Nairobi, Kenya, December 2025. Photo by Boniface Muthoni/SOPA/Getty Images

That bus is gone now. In its place, a patchwork of privately owned minivans fills a gap that successive governments declined to close. We have SACCOs – savings and credit cooperative ownership schemes, some run with deep conflicts of interest. When one set of owners is unhappy with competing operators, it can make its displeasure felt. The system is not broken. It has been arranged to serve the people who own the vans, not the millions who board them. Fares rise, routes are fought over, and the daily commute becomes a tax paid to vested interests that go unchallenged.

I spent years thinking about Nairobi’s transport the way most people do, as a problem of infrastructure. Build the roads, regulate the operators, fund the buses. But the longer I have spent studying how African governments raise money, spend it, lose it, and borrow it back again, the more clearly I see that what looks like a transport problem is really a question of political economy. At the heart of political economy is the issue of human rights.

There is an Ethiopian proverb: you think of water when the well is empty. This essay is about who is draining the well, and what it would take to fill it back up.

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There is a conventional way of talking about human rights. It is a language of courts and covenants, constitutions and obligations, of states that are either compliant or in breach. It is a language I respect and have spent my career working within. But it has a blind spot. Rights require money.

You cannot protect the right to healthcare without funding hospitals. You cannot guarantee the right to education without paying teachers. You cannot deliver justice without funding courts. And you cannot ensure the right to movement and economic participation without building the infrastructure and regulating the service providers to make it possible. The people of Nairobi know this with their bodies every single morning.

This is not a controversial claim in principle. Most human rights frameworks acknowledge it, at least implicitly. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights obliges states to realise these rights ‘to the maximum of [their] available resources’. The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights goes further, protecting rights to health, education, work, and a satisfactory environment in language that has direct fiscal implications. Rights, in other words, have price tags.

The problem is that the people who design global financial rules and the people who design global human rights frameworks have, for most of the past half-century, operated in entirely separate rooms. Finance ministers talk to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Human rights lawyers talk to the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council. The budgets that determine whether rights can be realised are set in conversations where human rights are rarely on the agenda.

Every dollar shifted offshore is a hospital unfunded, a classroom without a teacher, a bus network barely built

Nairobi’s transport system is what happens when those conversations never meet. The worker who spends three hours a day commuting from Mathare to the Central Business District, packed into a vehicle that may or may not arrive, paying a fare that rises when demand is highest and her wages are the same, is not merely inconvenienced. She is experiencing the consequence of a state that does not have the fiscal resources required to guarantee her right to move through her own city. That is a rights failure with a fiscal cause.

Commuters stuck in traffic in downtown Nairobi, Kenya. Photo by Sven Torfinn/Panos Pictures

When we ask why those fiscal resources are not there, we enter territory that is far bigger than Nairobi, far bigger than Kenya, and far older than any government currently in power. This is where the real story of African public finance begins – not in the budgets that ministers read out each year, but in the flows of money that never reach them.

African governments are not poor. They are made poor. This is the argument I make in my book Financing Africa (2019), and it remains the most important claim anyone can make about development finance on this continent.

The evidence is not subtle. According to the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Africa loses an estimated $88.6........

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