Nations Meet in Spain for UN Effort to Combat Poverty

World 05:07 PM - 2025-06-30

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

Many of the world’s nations convened on Monday, 30 June 2025, in Spain for the 4th International Conference on Financing for Development, aiming to address the widening gap between wealthy and poorer countries and to mobilise the trillions of dollars required to bridge it.

“Financing is the engine of development. And right now, this engine is sputtering,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in his opening comments at the four-day Financing for Development meeting in Seville.

Co-hosted by the United Nations and Spain, the conference is seen as a crucial opportunity to close the staggering $4 trillion annual financing gap needed to advance development, lift millions out of poverty, and accelerate progress towards the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030, which have been severely delayed.

More than 70 world leaders are attending, the UN said, along with representatives of international financial institutions, development banks, philanthropic organisations, the private sector and civil society.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told the delegates that the summit is an opportunity “for us to raise our voice in the face of those who seek to convince us that rivalry and competition will set the tone for humanity and for its future.”

U.S. Did Not Attend

At the last preparatory meeting on 17 June 2025, the United States rejected the outcome document that had been negotiated for months by the UN’s 193 member nations and announced its withdrawal from the process and the Seville conference.

The Seville Commitment document, approved by consensus, will reportedly be adopted by conference participants without changes. It says delegates have agreed to launch “an ambitious package of reforms and actions to close the financing gap with urgency.”

It calls for a minimum tax revenue of 15% of a country’s gross domestic product to increase government resources, a tripling of lending by multilateral development banks and scaling up of private financing by providing incentives for investing in critical areas like infrastructure. It also calls for reforms to help countries deal with rising debt.

U.N. trade chief Rebeca Grynspan recently said “development is going backward” and the global debt crisis has worsened.

Last year, 3.3 billion people were living in countries that pay more interest on their debts than they spend on health or education, and the number will increase to 3.4 billion people this year, according to Grynspan. And developing countries will pay $947 billion to service debts this year, up from $847 billion last year.

Angolan President Joao Lourenco, speaking for the African Group at the conference, said debt payment “consumes more resources than those allocated to health and education combined” for many countries.

While U.S. diplomat Jonathan Shrier told the 17 June 2025 meeting that “our commitment to international cooperation and long-term economic development remains steadfast,” he said the text “crosses many of our red lines.”

He said those include interfering with the governance of international financial institutions, tripling the annual lending capacity of multilateral development banks and proposals envisioning a role for the U.N. in the global debt architecture.

Shrier also objected to proposals on trade, tax and innovation that are not in line with U.S. policy, as well as language on a UN framework convention on international tax cooperation.

The United States was the world’s largest single founder of foreign aid before the Trump administration dismantled its main aid agency, the U.S. Agency for International Development. It drastically slashed foreign assistance funding, calling it wasteful and contrary to the Republican president’s agenda.

U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed last week called the U.S. withdrawal from the conference “unfortunate,” adding that after Seville, “we will engage again with the U.S. and hope that we can make the case that they be part of the success of pulling millions of people out of poverty.”

On Monday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen reaffirmed the bloc’s commitment to development financing, saying, “Our commitment is here to stay.”



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