Seville, Spain, June 30, 2025 (Lusa) - The President of Angola, João Lourenço, on Monday called for mechanisms to mobilise more resources for essential investments in Africa, including reforms to end the "unsustainable weight" of developing countries' sovereign debts.
João Lourenço was speaking at the United Nations (UN) Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development, which kicked off today in Seville, Spain, and which he considered a "crucial opportunity" for "a decisive push" for initiatives that "lead to finding more agile and more functional mechanisms for mobilising financial resources" to respond to the challenges of developing countries.
Addressing the conference as chairman-in-office of the African Union, João Lourenço said that these challenges are "climate shocks", price fluctuations, "the erosion of confidence" in the multilateral system and, "above all, the unsustainable weight of sovereign debt", which consumes more resources than developing countries allocate to health and education as a whole "and drastically limits" these states' room for manoeuvre to finance their own development.
João Lourenço was speaking to an assembly in which more than 190 UN member states are represented and which today formally adopted the ‘Seville Commitment’ document, which is intended to be the basis of a new architecture for international cooperation and financing for development, which has a deficit of US$ 4 billion a year, according to the United Nations.
The Angolan President emphasised, in particular, the need for urgent investment in "solid and functional infrastructure" in Africa, without which "there will be no development on the continent", and deplored the diversion of resources that could be earmarked for development to a new "arms race, a sad memory of the last century", with "African leaders seriously concerned about the direction the world is taking".
"Major infrastructure investments in Africa require a financing model that is more appropriate and adapted to the economic conditions of African countries, which implies a rethinking of the current financial architecture that can always take into account Africa's priorities, which are often neglected," he said.
In addition to the most vulnerable countries having "an active role and being involved in decision-making processes", João Lourenço also said that it is necessary to look at the public debt of African states, which is "acting as a brake on development" on the continent, diverting resources that could and should be invested in key areas.
In this regard, he recalled that there is a "common African position" set out in the African Union's Lomé Declaration of May 2025, with concrete proposals "to tackle the debt crisis", including "the creation of fairer and more transparent multilateral restructuring mechanisms, automatic debt servicing suspension clauses in the event of external shocks and encouraging the use of local currency in order to reduce exposure to exchange rate risk".
The African Union leader also called for a "significant increase" in funding to mitigate the impact of climate change in Africa and said that a just energy transition and climate resilience "must go hand in hand with debt relief and the construction of sustainable economic models".
"Africa continues to be one of the most vulnerable regions but paradoxically one of the least responsible for [polluting] emissions," he emphasised.
With regard to Angola in particular, he said that he was "resolutely committed to mobilising domestic resources, strengthening tax governance and combating capital flight, giving great importance to the United Nations Convention on International Taxation, whose negotiations have made encouraging progress that must continue," as it was "a historic opportunity" to correct "imbalances in the global tax system and ensure equitable representation of developing countries in international tax decision-making processes".
The Seville conference runs until Thursday and more than 60 world leaders, including heads of state and government, are in the Spanish city today.
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