Another blow to multilateralism as key players snub development financing parley
Kenya's President William Ruto speaks during the launch of the Sevilla Platform for Action during the 4th International Conference on Financing for Development, in Seville, Spain, June 30, 2025.
Sevilla is scorching hot now, with temperatures commonly reaching an upwards of 40 degrees Celsius! This was the backdrop for the just-ended 4th International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4), coming 10 years after the last such convening in Addis Ababa. Before Addis Ababa was Monterrey in 2002 and Doha in 2008 reviewed the Monterrey Consensus.
The brief historical context being that by the end of the 1990s, there was already an undeniable need for structural reforms to the international financial system instituted in the mid ‘40s. The Bretton Woods system set up at the end of World War II and made up of what were initially specialised United Nations agencies, the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (now World Bank) was no longer fit for purpose.
