It’s the fourth and final day of the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development. Many officials are leaving tired and happy, pointing to a new forum for indebted countries, progress towards a United Nations tax convention, and handshakes between public and private sectors as evidence of the conference’s success.
Civil society organizations got their 30 minutes of demonstrating today, which they took full advantage of. Chants and whistling could be heard all the way through closed-door side events, and overall, the takeaways were mixed.
“Despite the lacklustre ambition of the Compromiso de Sevilla where rich countries shirked their responsibility to act on the debt crisis and continued to embrace the private finance first approach to development, this conference also showed what international cooperation can achieve when there is political will for it,” said Hernan Saenz, Oxfam’s global policy lead for FfD, in a statement.