Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development
Official development assistance is expected to drop 17% in 2025 alone. Countries are in an unprecedented debt crisis, with 3.4 billion people now living in countries that spend more on servicing their debt than they do on health or education. And halfway through the week, the agency that was once the world’s largest donor — the U.S. Agency for International Development — officially became a thing of the past.
But after four days of negotiations, conversations, and handshakes, the conference’s 15,000 attendees seemed to leave Seville with a bit more hope than when they had arrived — and a sense that even in an almost unimaginable world, the sector hadn’t given up just yet.
“Am I hopeful about the results and what the outcome document will bring? Yes. I have to be hopeful,” said Maria Elena Agüero, the secretary-general of Club de Madrid, the largest forum of former democratic presidents and prime ministers. “We have to think in terms of what each of us individually and collectively can do to move this agenda forward.”
Multilateralism lives
The United States once contributed nearly 30% of the world’s official development assistance with just 0.2% of its gross national income. But this year, the country pulled sharply away from foreign assistance — not just dissolving USAID, but withdrawing from FfD4 entirely.
It was a blow for the Compromiso de Sevilla, or the Sevilla Commitment, the outcome document that negotiators had worked for months to come to an agreement on. Despite that, the United Nations said that some 50 government heads still showed up in Sevilla, braving more than 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43 degrees Celsius) heat to hammer out the way forward.
“We hope that they will find it [within themselves] to come back through the door,” said Amina Mohammed, the deputy secretary-general of the U.N., speaking about the U.S. in a press briefing on Thursday. “But for the time being, we’ve got billions of people, and we have a number of countries, who are moving forward on this. That’s what Sevilla has shown us: The show goes on.”
It was a sentiment we heard over and over again at FfD4: The U.S. had drawn away, yes — but maybe, the rest of the world will draw closer as a result.
“There are empires that are dying in front of our eyes, like the U.S., and there are others that are emerging,” Martha Bekele, the founder of Addis Ababa-based DevTransform, told me on Thursday.
Bekele highlighted the role of China, which has increasingly stepped into countries that the U.S. has retreated from. But throughout the conference, other nations came to the fore too — many teaming up to explore driving the Sevilla Commitment toward action. Spain, for example, has become one of the few nations that are not just holding firm on aid spending, but increasing their share. New coalitions were formed: Spain and Brazil, for example, announced a joint initiative to promote the global taxation of the super-rich, while eight nations — France, Kenya, Barbados, Spain, Somalia, Benin, Sierra Leone, and Antigua and Barbuda — launched a program to explore levies on premium aviation (think: private jets and business-class).
African nations are also growing louder, leading the charge to create a U.N. tax convention to make deliberations on the topic more inclusive, transparent, and cooperative; and celebrating the creation of a new borrower’s club, one that will be hosted at the U.N. and help indebted nations confront the ever-mounting debt crisis.
And of course, there was the private sector, with dozens of business leaders, investors, and banking executives pouring onto Sevilla’s cobblestone streets to talk about financing development and climate — even though over the past few months, headwinds from the U.S. have encouraged businesses to step away.
“That fact, that we meet here, and have an outcome document that has been agreed by the international community — albeit with the absence of the U.S. this time — is an accomplishment,” said Haje Schütte, the deputy director of the OECD Development Co-operation Directorate. “And it’s obviously a sign that multilateralism is still working.”
What comes next?
The world is less than five years from the deadline of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, and with more than a $4 trillion annual financing gap from meeting them. The Sevilla Commitment attempted to map out a way to get there, while the Sevilla Platform for Action — a string of more than 100 initiatives launched throughout the conference — aims to bring that map to reality.
SOURCE: Devex @ FfD4 <Newswire@devex.com. 7 July 2025