A global summit seeking to overhaul the international financial system wraps up Friday after taking small steps towards easing the debt burden of developing nations weighed down by climate and economic crises.
While host country France pitched the conference as a consensus-building exercise, leaders are under pressure to produce clear outcomes from the two-day meeting as economies stagger under growing debt after successive crises in recent years.
The summit comes amid growing recognition of the scale of the financial challenges ahead, with warnings that the world’s ability to curb global warming at tolerable levels is reliant on a massive increase in clean energy investment in developing countries.
“The current financial architecture is unfair, it’s punitive, it doesn’t give everybody a fair chance,” Kenyan President William Ruto told AFP.
He said developing countries pay up to eight times more in interest rates than developed nations “because they are profiled as risky”.
