The Philippines was the World Bank Group’s (WBG) fifth-largest developing-country borrower during the Washington-based multilateral lender’s fiscal year (FY) 2025.

Including the world’s poorest countries, the Philippines’ borrowings from the WBG during the FY covering the period July 1, 2024, to June 30, 2025, was the seventh-highest overall, amounting to $2.855 billion, according to the lender’s FY 2025 annual report published on Oct. 9.

Among clients of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the Philippines’ total loans in FY 2025 were only exceeded by Brazil’s $3.856 billion in commitments; Türkiye’s $3,791 billion; Argentina’s $3.73 billion; and war-torn Ukraine’s $3.142 billion.

IBRD is the WBG’s lending arm for developing countries like the Philippines.

If borrowers from the WBG’s International Development Association (IDA), which lends to underdeveloped nations, are included, the total loans obtained by the Philippines in FY 2025 are also surpassed by Nigeria’s $3.145 billion and Bangladesh’s $3.049 billion.

In the previous FY 2024, the Philippines was also the fifth-biggest borrower among IBRD clients, with a total of $2.35 billion in concessional loans obtained from July 2023 to June 2024.

The country was also the seventh-largest overall WBG borrower in FY 2024, just behind Ukraine, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Türkiye, Indonesia and India.

In FY 2023 covering the period July 2022 to June 2023, which coincided with the first full year of the Marcos Jr. administration, the Philippines borrowed $2.336 billion from the WBG.

As the Manila Bulletin reported earlier, the WBG plans to extend to the Philippines as much as $23 billion in loans and other financing from mid-2025 to mid-2031, which coincides with the lender’s FYs 2026 to 2031, amid the country’s climb to upper-middle-income-country (UMIC) status.

Under their new six-year country partnership framework (CPF), the Philippines is scheduled to borrow about $7.85 billion from IBRD in the next two years.

Once the Philippines becomes a UMIC, it will eventually lose access to concessional interest rates slapped on official development assistance (ODA) or cheap loans extended by multilateral lenders like the WBG, the Manila-based Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), as well as its bilateral development partners such as Japan and South Korea, among others.

To recall, the Philippines was the WBG’s No. 1 borrower in FY 2021, or from July 2020 to June 2021—at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic—with eight loans totaling $3.068 billion. Those low-interest loans had been primarily spent to fight Covid-19, which inflicted unto the Philippines the largest pandemic-induced output gap in the region.

In FY 2022, which coincided with the Duterte administration’s last year in office, the Philippines borrowed a lower $1.578 billion.