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An Impact Trust Open Dialogue with Imraan Valodia, Jayati Ghosh.
Image courtesy of Johnny Miller whose photographic project Unequal Scenes is an aerial documentation of inequality in the world’s largest cities.
In November 2025, the G20 South Africa Presidency published its first-ever global inequality report – commissioned by President Ramaphosa and led by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, with a committee including Jayati Ghosh, Imraan Valodia, Winnie Byanyima, Adriana Abdenur and Wanga Zembe-Mkabile. The report names what it calls an “inequality emergency” and the numbers are stark: the richest 1% captured 41% of all new wealth since 2000, while the bottom half of humanity gained just 1%. On average, someone in the global top 1% became $1.3 million richer; a person in the poorest half gained $585. Meanwhile, 2.3 billion people are now moderately or severely food insecure – 335 million more than in 2019.
The report’s core argument is that extreme inequality is not a natural outcome of globalisation or technology. It is a policy choice – produced by specific economic, political and legal decisions. Financial deregulation, weakening labour protections, privatisation, and the cutting of corporate and top income tax rates all drive rising inequality. And the most dangerous consequences are political: highly unequal countries are seven times more likely to experience democratic backsliding or authoritarian drift.
But the report does not stop at diagnosis. It proposes the establishment of an International Panel on Inequality (IPI) – a permanent body to assess and monitor inequality globally, modelled on the role the IPCC has played in reshaping climate politics. That process is now underway. Presidents Ramaphosa (South Africa), the President of Norway, and the Prime Minister of Spain have come together to lead the political facilitation of the IPI’s establishment. An advisory board is being assembled. A Geneva meeting in March, a South Africa convening in late April, an OECD meeting in June, and a planned launch at the UN General Assembly in July 2026 mark the path ahead.
This dialogue takes place at a critical moment in that process – just before the South Africa convening – and offers both an engagement with the report’s findings and a consultative space for exploring the harder questions that the establishment process is navigating.
Three convergent lines of thinking demand this dialogue:
The scale of the emergency. The report establishes that 83% of countries now have high income inequality, accounting for 90% of the world’s population. Wealth inequality far exceeds income inequality, with billionaires’ assets worth one-sixth of global GDP. The evisceration of middle-income groups is generating economic instability and political fragility. This is not a trend to be monitored. It is an emergency to be confronted.
Inequality as a driver of democratic erosion. The report’s finding that highly unequal countries are seven times more likely to experience democratic backsliding deserves sustained attention. At a moment when democratic institutions are under pressure across the globe, the link between concentrated wealth and the erosion of accountability is not a secondary concern. It is arguably the central political challenge of our time.
The politics of building new institutions. The proposal for an International Panel on Inequality is both ambitious and contested. The IPI establishment process is navigating significant questions – about where such a body should be housed, whose expertise counts, and whether the gravitational pull towards established Global North institutions can be resisted. These are not procedural details. They are tests of whether a new institution can embody the principles it seeks to promote.
Imraan Valodia is a member of the G20 Extraordinary Committee of Independent Experts on Global Inequality and is centrally involved in the establishment of the proposed International Panel on Inequality. He is Pro Vice-Chancellor for Climate, Sustainability and Inequality at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where he also directs the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies. His research focuses on inequality, labour markets, and the informal economy in the Global South. He chairs South Africa’s National Minimum Wage Commission, serves on President Ramaphosa’s Presidential Economic Advisory Council, and sits on the board of WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing). He is hosting the late April South Africa convening that will shape the IPI’s public form, and brings direct insight into the report’s findings, the establishment process, and the tensions – particularly around Global South and Global North dynamics – that are shaping how this new institution takes form. This dialogue sits just ahead of that convening and offers a consultative space that can inform the discussions there.
Jayati Ghosh is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a member of the G20 Extraordinary Committee. One of India’s most prominent development economists, she taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University for nearly 35 years and serves on the UN High-Level Advisory Board on Economic and Social Affairs. Her work spans globalisation, trade and finance, employment patterns, gender, and inequality – and her book Women Informal Workers in the Global South speaks directly to the lived dimensions of the emergency this report describes. She is a member of the IPI advisory board and brings both the analytical depth behind the report’s arguments and the political economy perspective on what it takes to translate knowledge into institutional change. Her consistent challenge to the idea that economic outcomes are inevitable rather than chosen sits at the heart of this conversation.
This dialogue continues The Impact Trust’s 2026 theme of wax and gold – the Ethiopian concept of sem ena werq, where speech carries two layers: the surface meaning and the deeper truth beneath.
The wax of the inequality conversation is well established. The statistics are published, the reports are launched, the op-eds are written. Leaders express concern. Conferences are convened. Yet the architecture that produces inequality remains largely intact. The surface language of concern coexists with the deeper reality of inaction – or, worse, with active choices that deepen the problem while claiming to address it.
The gold is in the harder questions. Why does a report that names inequality as an emergency still have to argue for its own relevance? What does it mean that an institution designed to monitor inequality faces a contest over whose knowledge counts before it has even been established? And what would it actually take – politically, institutionally, economically – to move from diagnosis to redesign?
The report itself notes that inequality is not a given: “combating it is necessary and possible.” The gold in that sentence is the word “possible.” The wax is every institution and arrangement that makes it feel impossible. This dialogue asks what it would take to close the gap between the two.
This is not a webinar. It is a deliberative, interactive dialogue – an invitation to engage, to listen, to explore what it means to confront systemic inequality at a moment when the institutions designed to do so are themselves being built.
The “most famous photo” of inequality in Brazil: Paraisopolis, São Paulo. Courtesy Johnny Miller, Unequal Scenes.
Johnny Miller is a photographer, drone journalist and artist based in South Africa and the USA. He is interested in exploring transdisciplinary issues related to economics, health and architecture from the ground and air. His photographic project Unequal Scenes, an aerial documentation of inequality in the world’s largest cities, has garnered widespread praise and been featured in many of the world’s top publications, art markets, public and private campaigns. He is currently a Senior Fellow at Code For Africa, an Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity at the London School of Economics, a BMW Responsible Leader, and represented by Buchkunst Berlin gallery. Johnny is also the co-founder of africanDRONE, a pan-African organization committed to using drones for good.