From a classroom in northern Tanzania, an Irish missionary brother surveys the collapse of his life's work. Crumbling walls, schools without books, holes in the roof.

"This was a fine place once, but now we're being bled dry," he says. "The government has no money and education comes last on its list."

It's the same story throughout sub-Saharan Africa, where infrastructures are crumbling and the progress of generations is being reversed. Some countries have good governments, others not, but all are increasingly sinking under the burden of massive debt repayment. The poorest of the world are paying for the profligacy of previous generations as Western bankers extract their pound of flesh.

The statistics of world debt are staggering. The Third World currently owes the banks more than $2.1 trillion (£1.48 trillion). that's $2,100,000,000,000. Everywhere, health and education programmes are being cut so debt repayments can be met. African governments transfer to Northern creditors four times more than they spend on health. Developing countries repay four times as much in debt as they receive in aid.

The result, say aid agencies and the churches, is increased poverty, thousands of deaths, environmental destruction and the fuelling of the drugs trade.

The spiralling debt crisis and the approach of the millennium have spurred debt relief activists to lobby for a radical, one-off solution to the problem. The Jubilee campaign so-called after the biblical concept in which debts were written off and slaves freed every 50 years is calling for the cancellation of all unpayable debt in the developing countries by the year 2000.

If the banks agree to it, Jubilee will amount to the mother of all millennium presents the backlog of unpayable debt in sub-Saharan Africa alone amounts to $135 billion. But as campaigners point out, much of this has already been written off by bankers who realise they will never see this money again. Jubilee campaigners want debt remission linked to promises by developing country governments that they will spend the money that comes available on good development projects, and not on arms or large prestige projects. But there is little hope of retrieving money stolen in previous decades by corrupt leaders such as Mobutu in Zaire or Duvalier in Haiti.

Activists recently took their campaign to the annual spring meeting of the World Bank in Washington. The director of Trocaire, Mr Justin Kilcullen, who this year heads an international umbrella organisation of 150 aid agencies, called on bankers to put people and not just economic calculations at the heart of their policies. "It took years to negotiate just $7.4 billion of funding for the Heavily Indebted Poorer Countries Initiative, but when $100 billion was needed to bail out the economies of Asia, it was found in a matter of weeks," he notes.

Hard-headed bankers mightn't seem the best people to look for presents from, but even the mandarins at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are keenly aware that the debt crisis could turn global if developing countries start reneging on their debts. "Poor countries have often been misled by advice. . . from respectable bankers, sometimes more interested in the return of their loans and medium-term prospects than in the level of existing debt," Mr Michel Camdessus, managing director of the IMF, has admitted.

The World Bank and IMF have not forgotten the fright they received in 1982, when Mexico said it could not repay its debts. Only the provision of new shortterm loans staved off a major financial disaster, but even these loans have been swallowed up as Mexico and other countries go on borrowing like there was no tomorrow. The difference between personal debt and national debt is that while individuals can be declared bankrupt, countries have nowhere to run. Debts are passed on from generation to generation, making it ever harder for poor countries to escape their dire circumstances.

Following the oil crisis in 1973, Arab money flooded into Western banks, which then lent out vast sums at low interest rates to Third World nations. The money was spent on large-scale development projects, many of which flopped, and one-fifth went on arms.

Then, the prices fetched by raw materials such as cocoa, coffee, copper or tea started falling, and interest rates soared. The trap was sprung Third World governments, confronted with falling export earnings and spiralling interest rates, were forced to borrow yet more just to pay off the interest.

This has happened before. When Europe lay in ruins after the second World War, the US implemented the Marshall Plan. Germany's debt repayment terms were greatly eased. Today, though, only eight to 20 of the 41 countries identified as heavily indebted are expected to get relief under the HIPC initiative.