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Prime Minister Gaston Browne Champions Debt Reform and Climate Justice at FfD4
Sevilla, Spain – 2 July 2025 – Antigua and Barbuda took center stage on the third day of the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FFD4), as Prime Minister the Honourable Gaston Browne delivered impassioned and visionary statements that positioned Small Island Developing States (SIDS) at the forefront of the global development agenda.
In a packed side event titled “Financing Development in a Climate-Challenged World: Debt Sustainability Support Service (DSSS),” Prime Minister Browne delivered the keynote address, heralding a transformative moment for global financing frameworks.
Declaring that the world stood “at a turning point,” he underscored the urgency of tackling the interlinked challenges of debt, climate vulnerability, and sustainable development—challenges acutely felt by SIDS.
“The inclusion of the DSSS in the Compromiso de Sevilla, the final outcome document of FfD4, reflects the growing recognition that these converging crises demand innovative and inclusive solutions,” he said.
Highlighting the disproportionate burdens borne by SIDS, he stated, “We did not create this crisis. But we are stepping forward to offer solutions.”
He described the DSSS as a country-led, SIDS-driven initiative—originating from the Antigua and Barbuda Agenda for SIDS (ABAS)—designed to place the voices and needs of the most vulnerable at the center of reform.
Later in the day, Prime Minister Browne was the sole Head of Government invited to deliver a Special Address at Multi-Stakeholder Round Table 5: Realizing a Development-Oriented Sovereign Debt Architecture.
The high-level session, co-chaired by H.E. Pedro Sánchez, President of the Government of Spain, and H.E. Bassirou Diomaye Faye, President of Senegal, also featured Nobel Laureate Professor Joseph Stiglitz and other global financial leaders.
Addressing the gathering, Prime Minister Browne noted:
“For too long, our small island states have battled existential threats—climate shocks, pandemic aftershocks, and deep economic vulnerabilities—now compounded by unsustainable debt burdens.
Our development and survival hang in the balance.”
He reiterated the centrality of ABAS as a strategic and action-oriented framework:
“ABAS is bold, comprehensive, and indispensable. It is more than a roadmap—it is a lifeline.”
Among the distinguished participants were Finance Ministers from Cameroon, Tunisia, and Ethiopia, along with senior representatives from the World Bank Group—underscoring growing consensus on the need to overhaul the global financial architecture.
As the conference progresses, Prime Minister Browne’s leadership remains a source of inspiration and resolve. He left the international community with a powerful charge:
“Financing for development must be measured not by pledges, but by progress.
Now is the time to build a just and inclusive system—one that allows every nation, no matter its size or circumstance, to thrive.
Antigua and Barbuda will persist until that vision is fully realized.”
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Oh yes gaston champion cursing for money, it doesn’t matter how other government and organization try to carry out serious remedies to world issues, politicians like these monetize it, they think we don’t possess a scientific ideology only institutional poverty for begging, that’s embarrassing to see our leaders self imposed infantilized themselves and their country as human being living below human capacity and cannot care for themselves as the ethno supremacists doctrine prescribes so we looking at the white community from a paternalistic role, these politicians turn over billions of dollars since independence and can’t manage to use it to develop their country and people, only the politicians develop themselves from the looting of the tax payers monies to offshore bank, creating low interest loans financing for other nations where that bank is located while Antigua suffers.
And the worst environment damage is committed by these same politicians who allow any white person to do as they please with our ocean once the politicians get paid by these would be investors who comes to us on the premise of ethno supremacists doctrine demanding buffer zone and white sand beach front and promise of making as much of the citizens gardeners and maids.
Time for our politicians to go out their and represent us as academics. But by the way I don’t even think they are needed at these meetings, because we have no recycling treaty internationally, our people just dump appliances as though we are the engineers to determine what’s not good all because we don’t have the parts and service industries, this requires trade school and colleges, so we can fight climate change from home rather than go on these trips with baited breath romanticizing the monetization of the environment.
Debt reform and climate justice? That’s real leadership.
This man really tek up di fight fi di region.
Me like how he na afraid fi speak truth to power.
Hope he pushing just as hard locally as he doing overseas.