Keypoints:
- BRICS seeks greater Global South influence
- Dollar alternatives remain a work in progress
- Africa needs leverage, not new dependency
BRICS has spent years talking about changing the global order. In New Delhi this weekend, the question is whether the grouping can begin turning that ambition into something tangible — and whether the rest of the world should start taking its alternatives more seriously.
Leaders are meeting at the 18th BRICS Summit on September 12–13, 2026, at Bharat Mandapam in the Indian capital. India has placed resilience, innovation, cooperation and sustainability at the centre of its chairship, but behind that diplomatic language sits a bigger contest over who gets to shape the rules of the world economy.
At stake in New Delhi is a question that reaches far beyond the summit itself. BRICS is increasingly trying to turn the economic weight of the Global South into practical alternatives in trade, finance and global governance.
The real test is not whether BRICS can ‘defeat’ the West or bring down the dollar. It is whether the grouping can make Western-dominated systems less indispensable by giving emerging economies credible alternatives — and greater room to choose for themselves.
The dollar is not disappearing
Much of the debate around BRICS still begins with the US dollar.
Will the grouping create a common currency? Can it undermine the dollar’s reserve status? Is de-dollarisation already irreversible?
The evidence does not support predictions of an imminent collapse.
IMF figures show that the dollar accounted for 57.13 percent of allocated global foreign-exchange reserves in the first quarter of 2026, up from 56.42 percent at the end of 2025.
Nor has BRICS agreed on a common currency.
Instead, members are concentrating on something more practical: greater settlement in national currencies, stronger links between payment systems and cheaper ways of moving money across borders.
That may ultimately matter more than unveiling a symbolic BRICS currency.
Africa already understands the logic. The shift towards local-currency African trade through the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System is primarily about reducing transaction costs rather than declaring war on the dollar.
De-dollarisation may therefore be less about replacing the dollar than reducing the number of transactions for which it is indispensable.
Trade gives BRICS greater weight
BRICS also possesses far deeper commercial relationships than when the acronym first entered the global vocabulary.
UN Trade and Development says intra-BRICS merchandise exports reached $1.17tn in 2024, more than 13 times their level in 2003.
That does not make BRICS an economic union. There is no common market or unified regulatory system, and China’s commercial weight dwarfs that of many other members.
But rising trade changes the geopolitical calculation.
Western sanctions against Russia following its invasion of Ukraine demonstrated that economies with alternative markets can redirect substantial parts of their commerce.
The lesson was not that sanctions had stopped working. It was that they become less isolating when other markets, payment channels and sources of capital are available.
BRICS does not have to replace the Western economic system to alter the balance of power. It needs only to make exclusion from that system less absolute.
A Global South voice, with divisions
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has framed the New Delhi summit around a wider ambition: moving the Global South from being a rule-taker to a rule-shaper.
That argument resonates because institutions such as the IMF, World Bank and UN Security Council still carry power structures shaped decades ago.
BRICS wants greater influence within those institutions while simultaneously building alternatives such as the New Development Bank and new payment arrangements.
Yet its internal tensions remain substantial.
India and China are strategic competitors despite improving relations. Russia and China are generally more comfortable seeing BRICS as a counterweight to Western power, while India and Brazil have resisted turning it into an explicitly anti-Western coalition.
Iran and Gulf members also bring competing Middle Eastern interests into the grouping.
Yet BRICS members managed to agree summit declaration language on September 12 despite those differences.
That may reveal something important. BRICS’ influence does not necessarily depend on becoming a conventional alliance. Its attraction may lie precisely in allowing countries with different interests to cooperate without surrendering their strategic independence.
Africa needs leverage, not dependency
For Africa, this is where the BRICS debate becomes more consequential.
South Africa, Egypt and Ethiopia give the continent direct representation inside the grouping, while wider BRICS relationships increasingly shape African trade, infrastructure and investment.
More lenders, markets and competing powers can give African governments greater negotiating space.
The expansion of PAPSS offers a relevant example. As Africa Briefing has reported, the system aims to increase direct settlement of cross-border African payments while reducing reliance on hard-currency intermediaries.
But multipolarity does not automatically mean economic liberation.
Africa could reduce its dependence on Western capital only to become more reliant on Chinese markets or another set of external powers.
If the continent continues exporting copper, cobalt, lithium, oil and cocoa while importing higher-value manufactured goods, changing trading partners will not fundamentally change its position in the global economy.
Dependency can survive a change of partner.
That is why deeper trade under AfCFTA, African manufacturing and greater local value addition ultimately matter more than choosing between geopolitical camps.
The real story is choice
Washington remains formidable.
The dollar still dominates global reserves, US capital markets retain extraordinary depth and American economic power remains capable of imposing significant costs.
But there is a paradox.
The more sanctions, tariffs and access to financial infrastructure are used as geopolitical tools, the stronger the incentive becomes for governments to build alternatives.
That does not mean America is being replaced.
It means countries are acquiring more choices.
They can trade with different partners, borrow from different institutions, experiment with new payment systems and pursue relationships with Washington, Beijing, Brussels, Moscow and New Delhi without necessarily accepting permanent alignment with any one of them.
That is the real significance of the September 12–13 BRICS Summit.
The global order is not being overturned in New Delhi. The dollar is not dying, and BRICS is not becoming a perfectly united anti-Western bloc.
What is emerging instead is a world in which economic and political power is becoming harder to monopolise.
For Africa, that could create an historic opportunity, but the prize is not a new external patron. It is the power to negotiate on its own terms — and to make multipolarity serve African interests rather than simply reshuffle foreign influence.
