The Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development, or FfD4, in Sevilla, Spain, is over.
Devex’s Elissa Miolene has the main outcomes here, from a borrowers’ forum to an eight-nation pledge to explore using levies on premium aviation for the likes of climate adaptation.
And to listen to the dozens of experts who spoke at Casa Devex last week in Spain, there are as many diagnoses for what ails human development as there are cures.
For Manfred Schepers, CEO of the ILX Fund, an asset manager, it’s a systemic gap in both the availability and comparability of financial risk and return data from development finance and private markets. Without fixing this, he argued, the trillions in global pension and sovereign wealth funds will remain disconnected from development priorities.
For pharma executive Priya Agrawal, vice president for health equity and partnerships at MSD, it’s a lack of “demand creation” through public procurement or donor programs that commit to purchasing from local manufacturers.
A sign of the times: Official development assistance is featured only once among the more than 130 initiatives in the Sevilla Platform for Action — and even then as part of an OECD commitment to strengthen the process for graduating ODA recipients.
Rather, Giulia Mascagni, executive director of the International Centre for Tax and Development, told Devex that as foreign aid budgets continue to shrink, “tax is going to be the linchpin of development finance.”
Oxfam recently calculated that the wealth of the world’s richest 1% has surged $33.9 trillion since 2015, enough to end annual poverty 22 times over, yet billionaires only pay around 0.3% in real taxes. Oxfam International Executive Director Amitabh Behar argued that it’s simply a question of political will as to whether those resources will be directed to fight inequality.
If those asks sound familiar, though, that’s because they are.
Paul Okumu, a civil society advocate who has advised the German government, the European Commission, and the United Nations Development Programme, posted an interesting reflection on how little the FfD4 outcome documents have changed from 2002 to 2025.
“There is something about development sector advocacy and Policy change that has to give way,” Okumu wrote on LinkedIn. “Is this really how we want to continue advocacy? How we want to bring change? Is it worth all that money, all those CO2 emissions? Could it be that this is actually the strategy - to make an appearance of wanting change?”
+ Check out our page for all FfD4 coverage, and watch all Casa Devex conversations here.
Outcomes-based finance, or OBF, has often been hailed as a forward-thinking model, but it’s also earned a reputation for being complex, hard to scale, and largely confined to small pilot programs. Now, with shrinking aid budgets and increasing pressure for tangible, measurable results, is OBF finally poised for broader adoption?
Tomorrow, July 9, Devex Business Editor David Ainsworth will be joined by the CEOs of the British Asian Trust and Levoca to explore how the latest high-level conversations — including those at the FfD4 summit in Sevilla — are influencing outcomes-based finance models. Register for the event here.
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With all the attention on how to support the private sector in Sevilla, we leave you this week with a cautionary tale on what happens when such support goes awry.
You never know what you might find trawling through the European Commission’s online documents register. And when our eyes paused over one called “COMMISSION DECISION on the waiver of a claim of EUR 918 212,37… ” a few months ago, we had to ask to see it. To their credit, the commission shared the full document, dated September 2024, with us via an access to documents request. It’s quite a tale.
Back in December 2007, the commission signed a grant worth €2.5 million to a company in the Dominican Republic to build a mill “for the transformation of biomass to electricity.” A first payment of €918,212 followed in November 2008. Planning delays, however, meant that local authorities’ permission to build the mill only came in March 2011. In December 2011, the commission asked the company for narrative and financial reports, including an expenditure verification report. And when these failed to impress, the commission spent 2012 trying to cancel the grant contract and recoup the €918,212 already disbursed. Alas.
After years in court, the commission finally won an order for €918,212 — plus interest and procedural costs — in July 2019. But when the commission went to the company to collect in November 2020, the latter did not respond. Why not? Here’s the kicker, according to the commission summary of the case:
“After conducting new searches on the creditworthiness of the Beneficiary with a view to enforcing the judgment … the Commission found out that the Beneficiary is an entity controlled by stock ownership by another company, which on its turn is owned by several natural persons having assets for an estimated amount of 1.6 million USD. However, the Beneficiary is highly indebted with debts registered for more than 75 million USD, including a debt of 50 million USD towards the Dominican government. Moreover, this search showed that according to the National Taxpayer registry the Beneficiary is accused of tax fraud by the Dominican government. The Dominican government is a privileged creditor with claims largely exceeding the total amount of the Beneficiary’s assets. Such a situation makes it impossible for the Commission – as a non-privileged creditor – to recover the amount of its claim.”
Result? “The recovery of the entitlement for the outstanding amount of EUR 918 212,37 … plus interest, established as being receivable from the Consorcio Tecno-Deah SA, and registered in the Commission's central accounting system under recovery order No 4940121032, is waived.” Gone.
Needless to say, we had some follow-up questions, which the commission answered via a spokesperson.
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Compensation Specialist
Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean (CAF)
Argentina | Bolivia | Colombia | Chile | Ecuador | Uruguay | Paraguay
Q: How could this happen?
A: This is an exceptional case where the Beneficiary’s accounting system did not meet the minimum technical requirements to prepare an adequate set of financial statements. As a result, the entirety of the expense incurred was considered ineligible.
Q: What actions or procedures has the commission taken to stop something like this from happening again?
A: Current grant attribution procedures require the submission of audited financial statements for the preceding three-year period. The fulfilment of this condition requires a sound accounting capacity in order to properly register the transactions and elaborate the expenditure reports.
Q: Do you have anything else to add?
A: The Commission has moved steadily ever since (the contract in question was signed in 2007), from a paper based system of presentation of grant proposals towards an IT based system. This transition has reinforced greatly the previous scrutiny of the candidates’ aptitudes, including their technical and financial capacity.
Chinese aid: What’s the real story? [LinkedIn]
Finance ministers from the BRICS group called on Saturday for reform of the International Monetary Fund, including a new distribution of voting rights and an end to the tradition of European management at the helm. [Reuters]
Five Nordic countries, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have given political backing for a new asset class in development financing, involving pension funds co-financing with multilateral development institutions [Development Today]