Financing for Development | Seville Conference: Far behind the needs

"We live in a world where trust is crumbling and multilateralism is being severely tested." There should be no contradiction to these words from the opening speech by UN Secretary-General António Guterres. Ten years after the third Financing for Development Conference in Addis Ababa, the fourth will take place in Seville from June 30 to July 4. According to Guterres , two-thirds of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set for 2030 are still behind schedule. Achieving them would require investing more than four trillion dollars annually. No additional funds were approved; instead, on the first day of the conference, the so-called Seville Commitment was unanimously adopted. It was agreed upon in advance on June 17 without the USA, after the Trump administration withdrew from the process because it felt its positions were not being adequately considered. The international community thus committed itself, without the United States being present in Seville, to a joint approach to achieving goals such as the elimination of extreme poverty and hunger by 2030, despite the pressure to cut costs. The how remained open.

Minimal consensus without ambition

Adopting the final document without further negotiations on the first day has both advantages and disadvantages, says Klaus Schilder. The development finance expert at Misereor is in Seville and one of the speakers at the live briefing "What's happening at the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development?" on July 1. The advantage, he says, is that an agreement was reached at all, given the geopolitical tensions; the disadvantage is that there is no longer any possibility of using negotiating pressure to ensure a more ambitious document, as was achieved at the previous conferences in Doha in 2008 and Addis Ababa in 2015 – including through the participation of non-governmental organizations, which had to fight for their full cooperation this time. The "Seville Commitment," on the other hand, leaves Schilder with the impression of a "minimal consensus," a compromise, even if the correct translation for the Spanish "Compromiso de Sevilla" is, in fact, "commitment."

At the forum of non-governmental organizations last weekend, 1,400 representatives met and, according to Schilder, expressed clear criticism of the final document: Global crises require ambitious political action by states, prioritizing principles such as justice, democracy, and human rights was the tenor, and the civil society statement summed it up succinctly: "The global financial architecture is failing people and the planet."

Guterres called for the "engine of development to be restarted" in a world "shaken by inequalities, climate chaos, and raging conflicts." There is no doubt about the necessity. 3.4 billion people live in countries that currently have to spend more on debt servicing through interest and principal than they can invest in health and education , the World Trade and Development Conference (UNCTAD) announced in Seville, speaking of a "silent crisis." "Given the huge financing gap of over four trillion dollars, the proposals to reform the global financial architecture are completely inadequate, especially with a view to ending the debt crisis in the Global South," Schilder agrees with UNCTAD.

Cuts are globally en vogue

Instead of a concerted international community tackling the debt crisis through state insolvency legislation and debt cancellation, as well as investing more resources in development financing, the signs point to cuts. According to a study, the cuts in US aid under President Donald Trump's administration alone could result in more than 14 million deaths by 2030. This would also affect more than 4.5 million children under the age of five, according to the study published on Tuesday in the journal "Lancet" on the occasion of the conference.

After the US drastically reduced its funding, other rich countries such as the UK, France, and Germany also cut development aid. These cuts could lead to "even more additional deaths in the coming years," said co-author Caterina Monti.

Charlotte Neuhäuser, a member of the Bundestag who is in Seville, seconded Monti: "If the share of the 2025 federal budget for the Bundeswehr, missiles and drones can double from 12.4 percent to 26.6 percent in one year, then the record cuts in hunger relief, schools and hospitals in the Global South are an immoral, short-sighted step backwards," said the spokesperson for global justice for the Left Party.

Dozens of leading politicians and more than 4,000 representatives from the business community, civil society, and financial institutions have traveled to Seville to find new impetus in the field of development financing by Thursday. German Development Minister Reem Alabali Radovan (SPD), like many heads of government, was already back on the plane on Monday evening. In the Seville Commitment, Germany, along with other industrialized nations, committed to the goal of investing 0.7 percent of economic output in public development spending. But after Germany missed the 0.7 percent target in 2024 due to cuts by the "traffic light" government, the cabinet upped the ante last week: The draft budget for 2025 allocates 10.3 billion euros for the Development Ministry. That's almost one billion euros less than the previous year. At the Federal Foreign Office, the budget for humanitarian aid is to be cut by more than half, to just over one billion euros. This puts Germany in bad company. There is no sign of ambitious action in the face of a global crisis – not in Berlin, not in Seville.