The 4th International Financing for Development Conference (FfD4) must address the extreme inequality crisis that threatens people and the planet. The richest one percent has the same wealth as 95% of humanity3 while global decision-making processes keep reproducing colonial patterns of power relations that leave billions behind and block progressive multilateral reform. 

Inequality occurs on two fronts, national and global. The gap between the richest and the rest at the national level is very high or rising in most countries. Simultaneously the gap between the richest countries and the Global South rose sharply due to COVID-19 and the subsequent economic and debt crises, remaining unacceptably high.  This huge economic inequality between and within countries in turn thrives off and worsens other intersecting inequalities such as climate, gender, race and colonialism. Economic inequality becomes political inequality; and in so doing it undermines politics, excluding the majority from power and decision making, fuelling the emergence of political polarisation, unaccountable elites and the corrosion of our common life.  

This political inequality is key to understanding the deadlocks present in different multilateral processes, the quantity and quality of financing the Global South has access to, and the perpetuation of an economic system that thrives off the harmful exploitation of labour, women and natural resources from the Global South. An excessive concentration of power and wealth in a few super-rich individuals and large corporations allows them to shape global rules in their favour risking the delivery of public goods. This exclusion of Global South governments and voices from civil society blocks ambitious progressive reforms on key areas like debt.  

Hence, any action on financing must tackle both national and global inequality, and address economic, social and political inequalities. 

Report by Oxfam