Alex Brandon/AP

President Joe Biden listens as Vice President Kamala Harris speaks about the American Rescue Plan, a coronavirus relief package, in the Rose Garden of the White House on March 12, 2021. Top members of the Biden administration are promoting the plan this week in trips to several politically important states.

President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and their spouses are fanning out across the country this week, “selling” the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. 

They’re staging events with state and local leaders, and highlighting elements of the package aimed at helping struggling Americans, businesses, schools, and local governments weather the pandemic. 

But wait, one might ask, isn’t the American Rescue Plan (ARP) already signed into law? And isn’t it already popular – as seen in a Pew Research Center poll showing 70% support among U.S. adults? 

Yes to both. 

What’s really happening is a multipronged effort to heed a major lesson of the early Obama years and launch the first big Democratic salvo of the 2022 midterms. At the same time, Mr. Biden seems to be recasting the American presidency as more of a team effort after four personality-driven years of Donald Trump.

In key ways, “Joe Biden is trying to de-center the presidency from a person and center it on the Cabinet functions and on those other than the president of the United States,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

That doesn’t mean President Biden has been reluctant to fully wield the power of his office; he signed a record number of executive orders in his opening days as president. And, Professor Jamieson adds, it’s still essential that Mr. Biden address the public directly to explain his decisions. 

But as a public presence – be it on social media or in his dealings with the press corps – the new president has often ducked the spotlight where President Trump flooded the zone. Mr. Biden has waited longer than any new president in a century to hold a formal press conference, though one is now scheduled for March 25. Mr. Trump frequently engaged with reporters, sometimes at length, even if he, too, rarely held press conferences. 

Mr. Biden’s propensity for gaffes, a staple of his decadeslong political career, may be behind some of the reluctance to put him under the klieg lights. His low-key presidential campaign, restricted by the pandemic, may even have been key to his victory last November (though Mr. Biden did well in his two debates against Mr. Trump, Ms. Jamieson says, “and that’s a difficult venue”).

Pleas from White House reporters for a formal, televised questioning of the president may be the least of Team Biden’s worries right now. Shaping voters’ perceptions of the ARP could be crucial to Democrats’ hopes of keeping their razor-thin majorities in both houses of Congress. 

Erin Scott/Reuters

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi signs the American Rescue Plan as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer applauds during the ceremony following passage of President Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 10, 2021.

For Mr. Biden, who served eight years as vice president, the parallels between today and 2009 – when he and President Barack Obama took office amid a global financial crisis – seem to weigh heavily. 

At an event earlier this month, Mr. Biden recalled telling President Obama back in 2009 that he needed to do more to make sure Americans understood what his big economic rescue package had done to help average citizens. Mr. Obama, he said, told him he didn’t want to “take a victory lap.” 

Dan Pfeiffer, a former top Obama aide, recently wrote that he doesn’t disagree more could have been done, but adds that “it wasn’t for lack of trying. ... It was nearly impossible to break through the avalanche of bad news.”

The Democrats’ shellacking in the 2010 midterms – following the rise of the conservative, populist tea party movement sparked by bank bailouts – is seared in the party’s collective memory. And in the 2022 elections, the margin for error is much smaller, with a 50-50 Senate and only a five-seat Democratic margin in the House. 

Another former Obama White House aide, Eric Schultz, suggests that it’s not quite fair to compare the circumstances of 2009 with today, saying that a global financial crisis and a public health emergency are “apples and oranges.” 

Today, “the fact that a lot of what was passed can immediately be felt is going to make a huge difference,” says Mr. Schultz, who consults for the former president. 

But Team Biden isn’t taking any chances, as this week’s public relations blitz makes clear: The president traveled Tuesday to Pennsylvania and on Friday heads to Georgia, two of the five Trump states from 2016 that Mr. Biden won last November. 

Vice President Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, held events Monday and Tuesday in Democratic-leaning Nevada and Colorado. First lady Jill Biden, a professor whose travels this week have focused on education, headed to Democrat-dominated New Jersey on Monday and will visit battleground New Hampshire on Wednesday. 

The question of when Mr. Biden will finally have a press conference has been a favorite topic on Fox News – and among the White House press corps – but hardly matters to voters, political analysts say. 

It’s “a press obsession, not a public one,” Karlyn Bowman, an expert on polling at the American Enterprise Institute, writes in an email. 

Still, the fact that Mr. Biden has waited so long means that when he does finally have one, the stakes will be higher, says Martha Joynt Kumar, an expert on presidential communications at Towson University in Maryland. 

“A solo press conference can be a high-wire act,” Professor Kumar says. With each passing day, “they’re moving the wire higher up. And the president has a shorter pole.”

In addition, she says, the longer Mr. Biden waits, the more tough issues rise up – such as immigration, and the thousands of unaccompanied children who have amassed on the U.S.-Mexico border. 

Presidential scholar George Edwards III sees the prospect of Mr. Biden’s first press conference as important only for its informational value, and not carrying much ability to influence public opinion, given how polarized voters are. 

Still, there’s no doubt that Mr. Biden’s PR strategy within his first 100 days in office has established a sharp contrast with his predecessor. While Mr. Trump often wouldn’t share the limelight, Mr. Biden is all about using the resources at hand.

The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, briefs daily, and often brings Cabinet secretaries, presidential advisers, and other subject-matter experts to the podium for 10- to 20-minute Q&A sessions before taking questions herself. Frequently, she’ll tell reporters to ask a particular agency or Cabinet department for answers, suggesting a return to a White House that delegates rather than trying to micromanage. 

“Biden’s self-confidence is such that he can make use of other resources,”  says Professor Edwards of Texas A&M University.

Swetlana Frim teaches children to find their “superpower.” 

When the German child coach logged onto Zoom for a resilience training event last December, she found 6,000 children ages 5 to 12 across Germany ready to learn about coping.

Germany was nine months into an on-and-off pandemic lockdown. The government had just closed all schools and mandated a no-group-playdate rule that effectively isolated children and their families. Working parents were struggling to balance work with family duties, which meant children’s emotional well-being was often out on the back burner.

The kids needed help.

“In a situation like corona, you must have resilience – the ability to deal with change,” says Ms. Frim, who lives in the central German town of Lollar. “Once children have learned and mastered this superpower, they can solve any difficult situation they are put in.”

German politicians during the pandemic have been concerned mostly with the health of older and vulnerable adults, say child advocates, while downplaying the social and emotional needs of children. As the pandemic continued, the government instituted a winter lockdown that was the most stringent yet, banning youth under 14 from meeting with more than one person outside the family; previous lockdowns had exempted them.

Into this gap has rushed a handful of concerned citizens and nonprofits offering online and in-person opportunities for children to gather. Their goal is to help young Germans to weather the pandemic at a critical stage in their development, a time when they should be around peers learning to navigate conflict and develop emotionally.

“Education is only one side of [pandemic losses for young people],” says Jana Liebert, an expert on social security for Germany’s Child Protection Association. “Interaction and learning from other people are immense developmental opportunities that they get through social contacts.”

Courtesy of Swetlana Frim

Swetlana Frim, a child coach who focuses on the resilience and emotional well-being of children, conducts an in-person class.

A call to action

Studies show young people in Germany, as in many countries, are suffering the effects of pandemic isolation. One in 4 German students admitted to being “often unhappy or depressed,” while another study concluded that 18% of children showed mental health problems, nearly double the pre-pandemic rate. These declines in well-being were steeper in Germany than in neighboring Switzerland or Luxembourg. 

For Ms. Frim, a software engineer who has a side career helping children, the pandemic became a call to action. In that 6,000-child Zoom session, which was marketed online to parents and children, she and about two dozen other trainers held breakout sessions to tackle mental resilience and well-being. “I saw 50 little faces looking at me,” she says.

Ms. Frim started by asking children in her group to identify their feelings, and differentiate between what feels good and what feels bad. From there she taught them to listen carefully to feelings because they “show me the way like a compass does.”

“If your compass is in the green zone you can lean back and relax, but the red zone means you need to change something,” explains Ms. Frim. The compass of everyone around them must also factor into every situation.

“They practice using that superpower of resilience,” says Ms. Frim, who charges the equivalent of $82 for four-hour online group resilience trainings. “I sometimes describe resilience as the paint you put on your ship. If the resilience paint isn’t on the boat, every little negative comment or situation affects you and makes you sink. We want to give them options for every situation.”

Ms. Frim says she and other trainers from the December Zoom session are being inundated with requests for child resilience training, including from schools.  

Reaching disadvantaged kids

Having a solid support structure helps children navigate adversity, yet about 3 million children in Germany live in poverty. For Die Arche, one of Germany’s largest private charities, an urgent priority in the pandemic has been maintaining contact with kids from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Teachers and counselors used to provide that critical point of contact outside the home, but as schools and youth centers have closed, disadvantaged kids have struggled in particular, say charity workers. Many are at home all day with parents who might be abusive, neglectful, or simply overwhelmed. (Die Arche works closely with police in cases of violence in the home.)

Cellphones and SIM cards are dropped off so kids can call for help directly. Die Arche staffers and volunteers have provided 2,000 donated tablets and laptops to youth in need during the pandemic, allowing them to learn remotely and access mental health counseling.

The charity also invites kids ages 2 to 15 to congregate at 27 centers across Germany for free play and sports, as well as support for online schooling. These centers provide a substitute for social interaction at a time of school closures. In recent weeks, Germany has begun to reopen primary schools for hybrid learning; secondary schools are still closed.

Learning to navigate the diversity of life via the playground shouldn’t be delayed until later years, nor should it be pushed into the digital world, says Thilo Hartmann, a psychologist and COVID-19 hotline counselor.

In that way, Die Arche’s centers help fill a gaping hole. “Many mechanisms failed that were there before, such as youth clubs, outpatient mental health centers,” says Mr. Hartmann. “Families whose balance depended on these places fell apart.”

The community agrees that Die Arche is doing important work: A fundraiser last year raised 17 million euros ($20 million) to help fund new projects at an organization that has an annual budget of less than 13 million euros ($15.5 million.)

A tentative reopening

In mid-February, German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited with a dozen or so parents, representing different regions and child age groups, via an online forum. As the parents teared up in discussing their pandemic lives, Chancellor Merkel seemed visibly shaken. She emphasized a new focus on children and promised schools would be first to reopen. (Germany had resisted closing schools for much of 2020, in contrast to many U.S. school districts.)

“I wish I could just come by and take care of your kids for an afternoon, so you could go and have a break – but I can’t,” she said. “I really wish I would never have to make decisions like this.”

There are a few upsides to children’s pandemic isolation. Whatever resilience produced by adverse events endures, and kids are incredibly adaptive, says Chris Cocking, a resilience researcher who teaches at the University of Brighton in the United Kingdom. He says that children may also be developing new and intricate social bonds, both with their own siblings and with new friends they meet online.

This mirrors the unexpected bonds struck between strangers during the pandemic and after traumatic events like terrorist attacks. After a semblance of normalcy resumes, the logistics of daily life can get in the way, Mr. Cocking says, but ultimately those bonds tend to last.

As the pandemic has dragged on, Setareh Ansari worried that her 10-year-old daughter in Germany was losing her ability to socialize. So, she set up an online playdate with a cousin’s daughter in Iran whom her daughter had met during previous visits.  

The girls began talking regularly. They chat about their bird and bunny pets. They play-cook. They played cards and dolls. They read to each other in Iranian, because Ms. Ansari’s daughter wants to improve her language skills.

“They’ve met before, but this intense friendship they’ve developed is only because of the pandemic,” says Ms. Ansari, who lives in a small town outside Stuttgart. 

Her daughter has also joined an online drawing class with Iranian children and an English class with British children, on top of the digital “pen pal” relationship with her cousin’s daughter.

“This has opened so many new doors for us,” says Ms. Ansari. “It’s so nice to be able to do all these new things now. When my daughter starts school again, she might talk less with [new friends], but they’ll still be good friends.”

Carlos Barria/Reuters

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin speaks to Defense Department personnel during a visit by President Joe Biden at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, Feb. 10, 2021. Last week, Secretary Austin said the military "will act immediately to include the security implications of climate change in our risk analyses, strategy development, and planning."

It begins as many war games do, with an opening tableau set in rather dire circumstances: America is coping with the consequences of a once-in-a-thousand-year drought, and the climate change-linked catastrophes keep coming, fast and furious. 

There are 2 million migrants, driven by food insecurity, gathered along the southern border “in a network of semi-permanent, slum-like refugee camps.” Criminal gangs are exploiting power vacuums, seizing control of vast swaths of territory. Rising sea levels mean more resource battles yet to come.

It’s just this sort of tabletop military exercise, produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, that President Joe Biden may have had in mind when, within days of assuming office, he dubbed climate change “an essential element of U.S. foreign policy and national security” and tasked the Pentagon with weaving the security implications of that into defense strategy. 

The United States military, as a result, “will act immediately to include the security implications of climate change in our risk analyses, strategy development, and planning,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said last week, warning that “climate change presents a growing threat” to America’s “defense objectives.”

Yet in an era when Pentagon planners must brace for everything from terrorist attacks to old-school great power battles – and given the colossal carbon footprint the U.S. military produces in its attempts to address these perils – successfully placing climate change at the top of the list of threats will hinge in large part on a key question: How deep does the Pentagon’s environmental ethos run?

“Protecting ourselves from the environment”

It was in 1992, with the U.S. intervention in Somalia, that a growing culture of environmental awareness began to take shape in the Department of Defense (DOD), says Samuel Brannen, senior fellow in the international security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The U.S. was leading a United Nations mission to end civil war and famine in the country, and many U.S. service members were able to see firsthand how catastrophes like drought could affect security.

More recently, in Syria, farmers experienced a stretch of droughts from 1998 to 2012, widely believed to be the worst stretch of sparse rain in roughly 900 years. In the eastern part of the country in particular, people lost their income and 85% of the country’s livestock died as food prices doubled. The desperate farmers, in turn, made easy recruits for armed opposition groups, including Islamic extremists.

Yet bolstering U.S. military defenses against security threats caused by the ravages of climate change worldwide seems disingenuous, analysts note, without acknowledging – and abating – the Pentagon’s own carbon footprint closer to home. The DOD is one of the largest consumers of fossil fuels and, as a result, one of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters on the planet.

Gregory Bull/AP/File

Marines stand near an artillery piece that links to solar panels during an exhibition of green energy technology in Twentynine Palms, California, on Dec. 7, 2016. The Department of Defense pushed to reduce reliance on fossil fuels under the Obama administration, an effort that is now moving full speed ahead.

But that fact has taken some time to sink in. When environmental mandates came down from the White House while John Conger was serving as assistant secretary of defense for energy, installations, and the environment in the Obama administration, for example, Pentagon officials tended to take the tack that, “OK, we’ll lower emissions, but only in the context of helping our [military] missions,” he says. “Yeah, people would pursue it, but let’s say I didn’t necessarily see enthusiasm across the department.” 

Mr. Conger says he got more buy-in, however, when he discussed how flooding caused by rising sea levels was damaging Navy installations – “how it’s more about protecting ourselves from the environment than protecting the environment.”

It was a mercenary argument but also an effective one, particularly with the soaring cost of severe weather damage to U.S. bases due to climate change. 

When Hurricane Michael hit Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida in 2018, 95% of the buildings there were either severely damaged or destroyed. The installation was also home to one-third of the service’s pricey fleet of F-22 Raptor stealth fighters, and 17 of the aircraft were damaged when a hangar roof collapsed on them during the storm. 

The cost of all these repairs was almost $5 billion; no enemy attack on U.S. bases in Iraq or Afghanistan has ever caused that much damage. A couple of months later, a tornado tore through the base.

“So when the Trump administration said, ‘Well you don’t have to worry about this climate change stuff anymore,’ the reaction [within the Pentagon] was, ‘Well, OK, but we’re going to do it anyway because it affects our mission,’” says Mr. Conger, now director of The Center for Climate and Security.

Full speed ahead

As a result, the Pentagon has for years pursued a number of alternative energy projects on bases, with fields of solar panels, for instance, installed for free by companies that then sell back the solar-produced electricity to the military at cheaper prices – and with a reduced carbon footprint – than it was getting from its municipal grids. 

But repair budgets also need to increase, analysts point out, noting that efficient energy systems don’t work too well when there are holes in the roof. That’s why senior defense officials routinely emphasize the $116 billion in maintenance backlogs on U.S. bases, with nearly one-quarter of military facilities in “poor” condition and roughly another 1 in 10 in “failing” condition, according to the DOD.

On the fuel consumption front – which represents roughly two-thirds of the military’s carbon footprint – there’s much the Pentagon can do to drive the demand for and development of electric vehicles, analysts say. Across the country, the Pentagon leases some 160,000 cars from the General Services Administration for getting around bases, and typically trades them out after three years. 

The latest directives could mean putting far more electric vehicles in these fleets. While the vehicle volume wouldn’t put a huge dent in the DOD’s carbon footprint, the sheer market force of the military’s buying power would help boost the electric car industry.

That said, the biggest gas guzzlers are not cars, trucks, or even tanks, but airplanes. And it’s the wide-bodied cargo and tanker planes, rather than, say, the fighter jets that are the biggest carbon emitters. As a result, to make long-standing changes in carbon emissions at the DOD, it’s going to be necessary to invent a new way of powering aircraft, analysts say.

In the wake of the Biden administration’s climate initiatives, such developments could be on the horizon. A study released this week found that airplane fuel made from food scraps, for example, could cut greenhouse gas emissions by 165% compared to fossil energy. Given the Trump administration’s backtracking on climate concerns, many federal agencies “felt they needed to do a 180 on climate change – but not the DOD,” Mr. Conger says. 

“Then, it was less putting the foot on the brake than taking the foot off the accelerator. Now,” he adds, “the accelerator is jammed to the floor.”

David Hertz knows solving food insecurity will take much more than a hot, boxed meal.

That broad view is the beating heart of Gastromotiva, the nonprofit Mr. Hertz founded in 2006. Operating out of Rio de Janeiro, it offers vocational kitchen training, nutrition programs, and food education to residents from low-income communities. Today more than 6,000 people have graduated from the school, many of whom have gone on to launch restaurants, food banks, and soup kitchens in their own communities.

In recent years, Mr. Hertz has sought to share his ideas – and spur change – well beyond Brazil, co-founding a “social gastronomy movement” in 2018. Such efforts are part of a larger trend, gaining prominence globally, in which food is used to accomplish a variety of societal goals.

“I’ve learned that food can be the engine of systemic change,” says the Brazilian-born chef. “That change has to come from within a person and it has to be local, but I’ve seen how people can become change-makers in their own communities.”

With COVID-19 exacerbating already daunting levels of hunger and unemployment worldwide, Gastromotiva’s work is more critical than ever, Mr. Hertz says. About 690 million people, or 8.9% of the world’s population, experienced persistent, gnawing hunger in 2019 – the most recent data available from an annual study by the United Nations. In Brazil, some 10 million people live in food insecurity.

Since the pandemic exploded in Brazil, the nonprofit’s food bank has cooked and distributed nearly 100,000 meals for homeless and vulnerable people, and distributed more than 55 tons of food.

Born and raised in the Brazilian city of Curitiba to one of 2,000 Jewish families, Mr. Hertz says his earliest and fondest memories of cooking involve his grandmother Maria Tena Hertz, who died last year at the age of 96.

“I lost my mother when I was very young and spent a lot of time with my grandmother. She was born in Poland and often made homemade pierogi. I always connected to Jewish food,” he says.

Growing up he was involved in the local Jewish youth movement, and in 1992 he went to Israel where he worked on a kibbutz for about 18 months. After that he spent seven years backpacking around the world with stops in India, Vietnam, China, and other countries.

It was an eye-opening experience. For the first time Mr. Hertz witnessed the extreme poverty much of the world bears.

Upon returning home in 1998, the then-27-year-old enrolled in Brazil’s first culinary training program.

“Most of the students came from low-income communities, and I began to recognize how privileged I was. I had a family who supported me; I had education,” he says. “I had connections that I knew would help me get a job afterwards. Not everybody has that.”

Courtesy of Alexandra Karmirian/Gastromotiva

David Hertz founded the nonprofit Gastromotiva in 2006. Through the training it offers, many people have gone on to launch restaurants, food banks, and soup kitchens in their own communities.

A pivotal favela visit

In 2004, he made his first visit to a favela in São Paulo. After spending the day walking the streets with a friend, speaking with the people in the neighborhood, he returned home. He kept thinking about the sheer number of people living in poverty and how there appeared to be few opportunities for empowerment. As he reflected, he realized he could use his skill set to help make change. And so rather than pursue a career in a restaurant, he decided he wanted to bring the cooking and managerial skills he acquired in culinary school to as many people as possible.

“I also realized how food can be linked to social justice and social change,” Mr. Hertz says.

To that end Gastromotiva offers a free, three-month course that teaches students kitchen skills and hospitality. The school operates in Brazil and Mexico City, as well as El Salvador and South Africa through the U.N. World Food Program.

As part of its vision, the nonprofit also runs a program called Solidarity Kitchens. Through the program current and former Gastromotiva students, many of whom lost their jobs in restaurants and hotels because of the pandemic, have turned their home kitchens into small delivery restaurants. The cooks get financial help, food donations, and supplies from local farms and businesses. Healthy and free meals are then delivered to their neighborhoods’ most vulnerable residents.

Today Gastromotiva is on track to serve 1 million meals a month from 300 Solidarity Kitchens. There are plans to open 100 more by year-end.

At one such kitchen, called Equipe Cozinha, Rodrigo Sardinha took a break to talk about how Gastromotiva has affected his life.

Before he tried his own hand at making pasta and cooking fish, Mr. Sardinha used to watch his father cook. Then he started cooking meals for small groups of friends. He loved the camaraderie that cuisine can bring, but he was unsettled on what to do for a living.

“I wasn’t from a poor family exactly, but I didn’t have so many opportunities,” Mr. Sardinha says in a Zoom interview, with stacks of cardboard boxes standing behind him, filled with meals to be distributed to residents of Lapa, a neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro.

He heard about Gastromotiva and enrolled. The decision was life-changing, he says.

“I received offers from restaurants after I graduated, but because I know Gastromotiva has the power to transform lives, I wanted to be a part of that. It’s not just about food, though. It changed my life in a better way. I didn’t learn just to be a technical cook; I learned to be a better person and to look out for others.”

In the past few years, Mr. Hertz has looked for ways to bring the philosophy of Gastromotiva to the world stage.

Chapters in 38-plus countries

In 2018, while attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mr. Hertz helped establish the social gastronomy movement with financial assistance from the agriculture and food company Cargill. The movement now has chapters in more than 38 countries, including the United States. Aside from running enterprises similar to the Solidarity Kitchens, these chapters use locally sourced ingredients, highlight local farms, and provide educational material about nutrition and sustainability. Additionally, Mr. Hertz works to bring together other nonprofits, social justice groups, and chefs to deliver healthy meals to high school students and teach incarcerated people how to cook, among other things.

Mr. Hertz’s work has earned high praise from chef José Andrés, founder of the nonprofit World Central Kitchen.

“We are a big family that is united throughout the world,” Mr. Andrés said in a conversation with Mr. Hertz for a Gastromotiva Instagram Live event. “I want to be with people who want to build bridges through food. We are not going to change the world if the business we do is not sustainable. We have to be pragmatic.”

A World Economic Forum young global leader, an Ashoka fellow, and a TED fellow, Mr. Hertz also recently received The Charles Bronfman Prize, an annual award of $100,000 for a humanitarian under age 50 whose innovative, entrepreneurial work has improved the world.

Additionally, as shown by Gastromotiva’s school operations in El Salvador and South Africa, Mr. Hertz has worked with the World Food Program – the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize winner.

“All over the world there are people who have been left behind,” he says. “We are trying to bring the pillars of being a chef – discipline, organization, teamwork, creativity, and an entrepreneurial mindset – to help. We’re not saying we can solve the problem entirely, but we can help.”

Reuters

The logo of the International Monetary Fund at its headquarters in Washington.

In war, as the saying goes, truth is often the first casualty. During the pandemic and its economic shocks, however, truth has become a blessing for some. Take the African country of Chad. When its debt levels grew too onerous late last year, it was forthcoming with creditors about its finances. By February, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) agreed to loan it $560 million. In return, Chad promised to improve its “debt transparency.”

For poor countries with rising foreign debts, honesty in financial data has become a necessity if they expect credit relief. Even before the pandemic, nearly half of low-income countries were already in debt trouble. Now with the worst recession in peacetime since the Great Depression, many big borrowers have either defaulted, such as Lebanon and Zambia, or are at risk of doing so. For Africa, its average ratio of debt to gross domestic product is expected to rise by 10 to 15 percentage points this year, up from around 60% before the pandemic. Brazil’s public debt is higher than its GDP.

But creditors, whether private or government, often doubt official financial figures, especially about loans from China that are generally not published. The value of openness in governance has never been more important. Last April, the Group of 20, representing the world’s richest nations, agreed to freeze the debt obligations of some 73 countries. More than 40 have taken advantage of the offer – knowing that international creditors such as the IMF and its sister organization, the World Bank, would insist on better disclosure of data.

With the G-20’s window for debt leniency closing in June, the group has again hinted at fresh relief. This time it might come through loans that rely on the IMF’s own currency, known as “special drawing rights.” And again, the G-20 is stressing financial probity.

Any debt relief for African countries would require a credible commitment to bold governance reforms, states Akinwumi Adesina, president of the African Development Bank Group, in a new report. “The nexus between governance and [economic] growth is the right focus for putting Africa on a sustainable debt path and forestalling any need for a future debt relief,” he wrote.

Debt transparency can play a critical role in reducing the cycles of boom and bust in indebtedness, write Ceyla Pazarbasioglu of the IMF and Carmen Reinhart of the World Bank in a Bloomberg commentary. “Transparency is a global public good,” they state. It helps create trust among creditors. It may also help lift the pandemic-hit economies of poorer nations. Many, like Chad, have already seen the benefits of honesty.