“This Biennial Summit is not just another meeting,” said UN Secretary General António Guterres. “It is the first of its kind.”

Attended by top politicians, international institutions and officials representing the G7, G20 and the COP30 UN climate conference, the focus was on addressing challenges in development finance on the rocky road towards the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

“This is networked, inclusive multilateralism in practice,” commended Mr. Guterres, who proposed the summit in 2021 before it was recognised in last year’s Pact for the Future Agreement as one of the key approaches to reforming international financial systems.

The event “was envisioned as a space to help bring coherence, ambition, inclusivity, and action.”

Lowering debt, implementing reforms

“Get your house in the best possible order,” International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said when discussing what countries can do to help support reforms.

Ms. Georgieva warned that global public debt is set to reach about 100 per cent GDP by the end of the decade which can deprive “many countries the fiscal space they need to absorb future shocks and to attend to the pressing needs of their populations.”

She urged countries to prioritise putting debt on a “sustainable path, flat or downward” and to implement structural reforms to attract private investment.

“Where regulation is outdated, you don’t need it, take it out” she said. “Where access to finance is constrained, make it easy, and think of property rights security, because then people have the confidence to invest.”

Closing the $4 trillion financing gap

Speaking at the summit, South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa – who will lead this year’s G20 meeting of industralised nations – stressed the need to close the $4 trillion financing gap required to meet the SDGs.

To do so, he laid out suggestions including “faster” and “fairer” debt relief and restructuring, affordable and accessible financing, and reform of the global taxation rules to help curb illicit flows.

“We need confidence that commitments that are made will be honoured and that global rules will be shaped by all members and not just a few,” said Mr. Ramaphosa.

The ‘remarkable resilience’ of trade

“While US tariff actions have had a major impact, creating an unstable and uncertain equilibrium in global trade, the core of the trading system remains stable,” said the head of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

In what she described as the “remarkable resilience” of the trading system, she said digitally delivered services had grown almost 10 per cent last year to almost $5 trillion, and that South-South cooperation continues to expand.

She encouraged member states to diversify trade and welcomed all free trade and regional trade agreements.

Closing the first session, the Secretary-General returned to a favourite personal theme of reforming the post-war financial architecture.

“Public resources are scarce, extremely scarce, in relation to the needs,” he said, while in the private sector, “international and national financial institutions need to do more and more leveraging of private investment and private finance.”

Mr. Guterres called out the current “bias against interests of developing countries”, arguing that capital borrowing must be priced more reasonably in the future to facilitate sustainable growth.