Sub-Saharan Africa's massive external debt is the single biggest obstacle to the continent's development. The $300 billion which African countries owe to foreign creditors represents a crippling burden which fundamentally hampers progress in every sector. The All-African Conference of Churches has called this debt "a new form of slavery, as vicious as the slave trade". As such, it is both a cause and a symptom of the structural inequality in the international economic system.