The Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development, or FfD4, began amid one of the darkest moments for global development in decades.
Official development assistance is expected to drop 17% in 2025 alone. Countries are in an unprecedented debt crisis, with 3.4 billion people now living in countries that spend more on servicing their debt than they do on health or education. And halfway through the week, the agency that was once the world’s largest donor — the U.S. Agency for International Development — officially became a thing of the past.
But after four days of negotiations, conversations, and…