The chairperson of the African Union, Cyril Ramaphosa, has said the coronavirus pandemic is a major threat to developing countries’ efforts to meet their development goals – which include targets on education, health and eradicating poverty.

Addressing a UN meeting on how to handle the pandemic’s economic fallout, the South African president repeated a call for debts to be halted for a period of two years and for debt relief.

Last month the G20 group of leading economies, including China, offered to suspend bilateral debt payments by dozens of the world’s poorest countries for the rest of the year.

At the same meeting the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on commercial creditors to join debt relief efforts.