Seville, Spain, July 1, 2025 (Lusa) - Equatorial Guinea's foreign minister said on Tuesday that the African continent requires fair access to resources, not compassion or charity, to promote its development.

‘Africa needs fair access to the means that will enable it to develop its own potential, based on its particular priorities and needs,’ said Equatorial Guinea’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Simeón Oyono Esono Angüe, at the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development, currently taking place in Seville, Spain.

Simeón Oyono Esono Angüe stressed that numerous successive international conferences and summits have produced valuable dialogue, and participants can still enhance concrete results, narrow the gaps, and reduce extreme poverty and inequalities, and climate change is hitting "with disproportionate force" the countries and regions of the world that have contributed least to causing it.

"Especially on the African continent," which requires "fair access" to the resources it needs to promote development, he said.

The minister of Equatorial Guinea, a member of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP), called for courage in saying that “success arises from deliberate effort and determined action” and stressed that “the international architecture continues to reproduce historical inequalities” and, in many cases, “to impose more barriers than development solutions” on the countries of the so-called Global South (the poorest), above all through unilateral measures and processes in which the most vulnerable states participate only minimally.

Even so, “Equatorial Guinea continues to believe in multilateralism, international cooperation and the sustainable development commitments made by the international community,” said Simeón Oyono Esono Angüe, who called for urgent and concrete action and for the Seville conference to be a moment of change.

The UN conference on development financing in Seville comes ten years after the previous one in Ethiopia in 2015.

The plenary session of the conference, which runs in Seville until Thursday, formally adopted on Monday, at the start of the proceedings, the “Seville Commitment,” a commitment for the next decade on international cooperation and financing and development, which the UN estimates currently requires an additional $4 trillion annually.

MP/ADB // ADB.

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