At back-to-back summits for organizations that represent developing nations, leaders brushed aside the growing rivalry between major powers.
Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni assailed the West's self-serving financial architecture on Sunday as his nation hosted the opening of the Third South Summit for the G-77, which has 135 members, plus China.
That summit followed on the heels of the Uganda-hosted summit of the Non-Aligned Movement, or NAM, which admitted South Sudan as its 121st member. Museveni is now chair of both the G-77 plus China and the NAM.
"We support the urgent reform of the international financial architecture to ensure that it is fit for purpose to respond to the financing needs of developing countries," Museveni said, calling on the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to revise their lending terms.
"The international financial institutions and multilateral development banks must support the national priorities of developing countries without any conditionalities that infringe on these countries' sovereignty," he said.
Finances, climate and Gaza
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres agreed with Museveni on the need for global financial reforms.
"Financial institutions and frameworks created after the Second World War still largely correspond to the power relations and the global economy of that time," Guterres told the G-77 plus China summit.
"They must be reformed so that they are truly universal," he said, "reflect with justice the realities of today and are much more responsive to the needs of developing countries."
Guterres also urged the G-77 to "hold developed countries to account for climate justice, and for leading an equitable and just transition, based on the phaseout of fossil fuel and massive investment in renewable energy."
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza have accelerated geopolitical tensions among competing major powers. That has propelled the stature of both the Non-Aligned Movement and the G-77 as rising political forces in a multipolar world.
The NAM formed out of the collapse of colonial powers at the height of the Cold War. It has aimed to rid the world of colonialism and promote independence so that developing nations would not be forced to choose sides between the United States, Russia and China.
The G-77, which grew to 135 members from its original 77, now allies itself with China while representing developing nations before the United Nations. China, Russia and the U.S., along with Britain and France, hold permanent, veto-wielding seats on the powerful U.N. Security Council.
At the NAM summit, leaders calls Israel’s military campaign in Gaza “illegal” and condemned attacks on Palestinian civilians and infrastructure. The movement also urged a two-state solution to the conflict and called for humanitarian aid access.
More than 24,620 Palestinians have died and 61,830 others have been injured in the war, according to the United Nations, along with more than 1,200 Israelis killed during the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants that sparked the war and saw some 240 people taken hostage. At least 5,431 Israelis have since been injured.
