On 3 July 2025, the fourth international conference on financing for development concluded in Sevilla, Spain.

Attended by dozens of governments, including the UK, multilateral agencies and banks and civil society groups, one outcome was the “Sevilla commitment”. This aims to mobilise global efforts on aid, trade, economy and debt to support progress on the sustainable development goals (SDGs).

The SDGs are a set of 17 goals, which are intended to be met by 2030. They include targets to achieve zero hunger, ensure access to quality primary and secondary education, and increase clean energy use.

This Insight summarises progress on the SDGs and their funding gap, as well as the conference’s outcomes and reaction to them.

What is the state of progress on the SDGs?

The UN Secretary General has continued to warn that global progress on many SDGs has struggled since the covid-19 pandemic. In the latest UN SDG report, covering 2024, the UN said that the world was “on track” or “making moderate progress” on 35% of the 137 quantifiable SDG indicators but 18% had gone into reverse since 2015.

Areas of improvement include a decline in child stunting and wasting (being too short for their age or thin for their height) and narrowing of gender gaps in education. However, climate action remains below target levels.

Global regions with particular challenges in meeting the SDGs (PDF) are sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania (excluding Australia and New Zealand) and parts of south Asia, where rates of poverty, undernourishment and under-five mortality remained higher than the global average in parts.

Cited factors to the lack of progress include:

What will meeting the SDGs cost?

The total costs of achieving the SDGs, including private spending, foreign direct investment, foreign aid and government revenues, runs into trillions.

In 2023 and 2024, the UN Conference on Trade and Development and the UN’s Inter-agency Task Force on Financing for Development estimated that in developing countries the annual funding gap was between US$2.5 trillion and $4.3 trillion from 2023 to 2030. The funding gap is the difference between what is currently spent and what the agencies estimate needs to be spent to achieve the SDGs. The estimates only relate to capital investments in infrastructure, with the largest single category being energy, totalling $2.2 trillion.

These costs have risen since the covid-19 pandemic and represent up to 4% of global gross domestic product (GDP).

The International Monetary Fund estimates that funding gaps in low-income developing countries for required investments in education, health, water, sanitation, electricity and roads constitute an average of an additional 16% of their 2030 GDP.

Where will funds come from?

Donor government aid will only be a small part of the financing of development.

The value of aid provided by the Development Assistance Committee donors, which includes the world’s largest donors except China, is expected to fall in future years.

In 2025, the United States, the UK, Germany and France have all announced reduced aid budgets. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development estimates that aid by donor states fell by 9% in 2024, and it projects this will fall by a further 9% to 17% in 2025. Countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and health in many countries, are expected to be particularly affected.

Nonetheless, donor aid can play an important role in providing emergency humanitarian aid, de-risking private investments, and supporting hard-to-reach areas and groups.

According to the World Bank, the value of foreign direct investment and remittances (cash sent back by migrant workers to their home countries) has been higher than overseas aid for over 20 years, and the two sources were each around six to seven times higher in value than state aid in 2021. Increasing local government revenues in aid-recipient countries, freeing up their spending from debt servicing costs and improving access to global trade are also cited as necessary to raise sufficient funds.

What did the conference agree?

The major outcome from the 2025 conference was the Sevilla Commitment and the associated Platform for Action, which includes over 130 actions and initiatives.

The commitment said that the world “cannot afford a retreat from multilateral cooperation” and “additional, innovative, adequate, affordable, predictable and accessible financing” should be mobilised from all public and private sources. Calls included:

  • support for developing countries to increase their tax intake, to at least 15% of GDP
  • for donor countries to reverse the decline in aid and recommit to the UN’s 0.7% goal
  • for G20 countries to strengthen and reform its Common Framework for Debt Treatments beyond the Debt Service Suspension Initiative, to support debt relief for borrower countries, and to consider passing legislation to prevent private creditors from delaying debt restructuring
  • scaling up lending from multilateral development banks (these include the World Bank and Asian Development Bank)

Going forward, the UK will be leading initiatives (PDF) on scaling up finance and capital for sustainable development.

What has been the reaction?

During earlier negotiations, Canada, Australia and New Zealand expressed “disappointment” at the removal of some language on climate change, while China and the G77 said it should have included a “commitment to leave no country or person behind”.

Early drafts reportedly included proposals for “global solidarity levies” to finance the SDGs that could include taxes on highly polluting activities or on high-income individuals.

The UN Secretary General, António Guterres, described the Sevilla Commitment as a “global promise” to support lower-income states, and said states should now implement the reforms to raise more private funds, address unsustainable debt, and establish a fairer global tax system.

The UK’s International Development Minister, Baroness Chapman, said the UK would help countries to raise more revenue locally, support reforms to debt relief and international aid system, and leverage private capital for development. She said UK expertise could play an important role in this process.

The UK Government has been criticised by aid groups and others for reducing the aid budget to 0.3% of gross national income by 2027, and for not committing to legislate to require private creditor participation in debt relief schemes. The government says it is currently pursuing “market based” solutions.

The United States did not participate in the conference, saying that the proposed agreement crosses “longstanding redlines”. These included increasing multilateral bank lending. It has previously said it “rejects and denounces” the SDGs and reiterated in June that it will “no longer reaffirm them as a matter of course”.

Further reading

About the author: Philip Loft is a researcher in Commons Library, specialising in international affairs.

Photo by: NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, using VIIRS data from the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership

Related posts