What are the benefits of being part of BRICS?
BRICS membership delivers four concrete things: a development bank that lends without Western-style policy conditions, a growing internal market of nearly 4 billion people, reduced reliance on the US dollar in trade and borrowing, and a louder seat at international institutions that have long sidelined the Global South.
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A bank that doesn't lecture you
The most tangible benefit is the New Development Bank (NDB), the bloc's own multilateral lender. The NDB is a functioning multilateral lender that did not exist a decade ago; it has approved $42.9 billion in financing across 139 projects since 2015, covering clean energy, transport, water and sanitation. The critical difference from the IMF or World Bank is the terms. For developing countries, BRICS offers a compelling prospect for obtaining development financing without political conditions and in local currencies rather than in dollars or euros. That last part matters enormously. When projects, trade, or sovereign borrowing are financed in dollars while revenue is earned in domestic currency, governments and firms are exposed to depreciation shocks and higher servicing costs. The NDB is built precisely to reduce that exposure. Approximately 25% of the bank's lending portfolio is already denominated in local currencies of BRICS countries, a figure set to rise to 30% in 2026.
A market of nearly 4 billion people
BRICS expansion has added Indonesia (population 284 million), Egypt (108 million) and Ethiopia (112 million) to a bloc that already includes the world's two most populous countries, creating a combined internal market of roughly 3.9 billion people. For a country like Ghana, whose exports have historically been concentrated toward Europe and North America, that is a different conversation entirely. BRICS countries have strong complementary industrial structures and resource endowments, and the mechanism provides an important platform for them to explore paths for innovative economic growth and align development strategies.
Reducing dollar dependence
This one is worth explaining plainly. When Ghana borrows in dollars and earns in cedis, every time the dollar strengthens, the debt gets heavier. De-dollarization, the term BRICS uses for reducing that dependence, is not about destroying the dollar; it is about creating options. One of BRICS' most tangible steps has been shifting trade settlements to local currencies. China and Russia now conduct most of their bilateral trade in yuan and rubles, bypassing the dollar entirely; Brazil and China signed a yuan-real trade settlement agreement, and India has begun purchasing Russian oil in rupees. BRICS members are building parallel infrastructure: the NDB lending in local currencies, BRICS Pay facilitating settlements, bilateral currency swap agreements reducing dollar dependence for specific transactions. These moves won't dethrone the dollar, but they do create optionality. For a country routinely squeezed by dollar volatility, optionality is real money.
A bigger voice in global rooms
The significance of BRICS expansion should be seen beyond the purely economic effect, in the form of greater influence for the group and for developing countries as a whole within international organizations such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization and the Bretton Woods institutions. The Bretton Woods institutions are the IMF and World Bank, built after World War II largely around Western priorities. Even countries that enjoy relatively positive relationships with the United States value BRICS as a vehicle for greater international economic integration in an otherwise fragmenting Western-centric global economy, as well as an opportunity to garner greater power than they hold within traditional, Western-dominated multilateral forums.
The honest caveat
None of this is automatic. An African government may borrow from the NDB in a local currency while continuing to issue dollar-denominated Eurobonds. BRICS builds a parallel layer, not an instant escape hatch, and one serious risk analysts raise is swapping dependence on Washington for dependence on Beijing. The benefits are real; capturing them takes deliberate policy, not just a membership card.
Follow-ups
Who are the BRICS countries? Isn't it Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa only?
BRICS now has 11 full members, not 5.
You're right that BRICS started as those five. The acronym "BRIC" was coined in 2001 by Goldman Sachs to describe four economies projected to dominate global growth over the following five decades: Brazil, Russia, India and China. The forum was formally established in 2006. South Africa was added at the BRIC Foreign Ministers' meeting in New York in 2010, and attended its first summit in Sanya in 2011, turning BRIC into BRICS. That five-member lineup held for over a decade, which is why so many people still picture it that way.
The 2024 expansion
A major phase of expansion began in January 2024, when Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates became full members. Saudi Arabia's status has some diplomatic fog around it, as the kingdom did not publicly confirm it had accepted its invitation, and its minister of commerce said the kingdom had "not yet officially joined BRICS" in early 2024. India, as the 2026 BRICS chair, has explicitly classified Saudi Arabia as a full member, publishing a government backgrounder stating that "BRICS comprises 11 countries" including Saudi Arabia. Most official sources count it in.
The 2025 addition
Indonesia was admitted as a full member of BRICS on January 6, 2025, becoming the first Southeast Asian country in the bloc and pushing the total to 11.
The full list today
There is also now a second tier. Belarus, Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Cuba, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, Uzbekistan and Vietnam joined as partner countries in 2025, a status designed to accommodate the wave of interest without immediately granting full membership. That's the layer Ghana would likely enter through if its application moves forward.
Collectively, the 11 full members represent 49.5% of the global population, 40% of global GDP, and 26% of global trade, which is why the five-name version of this story is so out of date.
What is the Global South?
The Global South is a political and economic grouping of roughly 130 countries across Africa, Latin America, most of Asia and Oceania that share a history of colonization and a subordinate position in the world economy, and the name has nothing to do with a compass direction.
It came up earlier in this conversation because BRICS, and the New Development Bank that comes with it, were built specifically to give this grouping more power and more financing options outside Western-led institutions like the IMF and World Bank.
What the term actually means
The Global South covers roughly 130 countries across Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, most of Asia, and Oceania outside Australia and New Zealand, that were shaped by colonialism and sit lower in the global economic order. The Global North is the other side of the line: Western Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Israel, Australia and New Zealand, and the split is political and economic, not geographical.
That last part trips people up. Australia sits deep in the southern hemisphere and belongs to the North America; India is north of the equator and belongs to the South. "South" here is shorthand for a shared historical position, not a compass direction.
What it groups by, and why that matters
The term does a specific job: it groups countries by what happened to them, extraction, colonial rule, unequal trade terms, debt dependence, rather than by how poor they are today. That is why Qatar, with a per-capita income above most of Europe, is still usually counted as Global South, and why the phrase survives even as economies inside it diverge wildly.
These nations often seek greater representation in global institutions, influencing international policy frameworks and fostering a multipolar world order. That agenda is precisely what ties the Global South to BRICS: the bloc exists to give these countries a seat at a table they did not design and have long felt excluded from.
Where the name came from
The term emerged in the 1950s, but Carl Oglesby became the first person to give it a contemporary political use when he commented on the United States's dominance over the Global South. The founding members of the Non-Aligned Movement also used the term politically. It has since replaced older labels like "Third World" and "developing world" in most serious policy writing, partly because those earlier terms carried more stigma and less political clarity.
Why it is not a clean category
A common misconception is that the Global South is a homogeneous entity. In reality, it comprises diverse nations with unique cultural, economic, and political contexts, challenging simplistic narratives and requiring nuanced policy approaches. Ghana and China are technically both Global South. So are Brazil and a small island state in the Pacific. What they share is history and structural position, not income level or political system.
The term is dynamic and does not consider geographic locations, meaning that members of this grouping who reach a certain development threshold may cross over to the Global North. South Korea is arguably already there.
No, Ghana is not yet a BRICS member, but President John Dramani Mahama's Cabinet approved a formal application to join just yesterday, making it one of the biggest foreign policy announcements of the week.
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