"A cut can save a budget but destroy our future": young people lament their lack of visibility at the Seville summit.

"Where are the young people?" asks Walberto Tardío, a 23-year-old Bolivian, as he leaves one of the dozens of events held this week at the UN Conference on Financing for Development . "The decisions made at this meeting, which takes place every 10 years, will have a particular impact on us, and on children, but I was surprised to see so few of them, and we weren't even present at the debates and negotiations," he adds.

NGOs have lamented that children were not given the necessary visibility in the drafting of the document and at the summit meetings, as they are "underrepresented in Seville, but overrepresented in the impact of current crises": conflicts, displacement, disease, climate crises, or cuts, in the words of Macarena Céspedes of the NGO Educo.

Tardío, who works for an organization that defends sexual and reproductive rights and fights against gender-based violence in the city of Sucre, believes that the process leading to the "Seville Commitment," the summit's final document, has not been inclusive and that young people should have been at the negotiating table. Sara Matamoros, a 22-year-old Spaniard, and Yvonne Bejjani, a 20-year-old Lebanese woman, also present in Seville, share the same sentiment. "Just because we don't have years of experience doesn't mean we can't have a say in some issues that will affect us most of all. A cut can save a budget, but it can destroy our future," says Matamoros.

The young Spanish woman refers to the brutal interruption of US cooperation , followed by cuts in European countries such as Germany and the United Kingdom. In this context, the visibility of children seems more urgent than ever, but Julia López, advocacy manager for the NGO Plan International, laments that in Seville, children were only considered in matters related to education, when all the summit agreements directly affect them.

"Children are not recipients of aid, but agents of transformation, which is why we must bring them to these forums and listen to them. Because they often know exactly what they need. And also because they are the most vulnerable to all the evils we talk about here," said Inger Ashing, president of the NGO Save the Children.

Children are not recipients of help, but agents of transformation, which is why we must bring them to these forums and listen to them.

Inger Ashing, president of the NGO Save the Children

The UN estimates that one in three children worldwide lacks access to essential services such as health and education. According to UNICEF , children represent one-third of the world's population, yet only 0.1 to 1.5% of GDP is allocated to their social protection. "With the ongoing cuts, 38 million children are at risk of not receiving vaccines, and millions more may drop out of school or end up malnourished due to lack of funding," says Javier Ruiz, general director of World Vision Spain.

"We're not making predictions; it's happening now. Children are dying today because of these decisions that reverse important progress, such as vaccination rates ," said José María Vera, executive director of UNICEF Spain.

It is not charity

In Seville, there was talk of increasing the volume of development aid, which, according to the OECD, will decline by between 9 and 17% in 2025 due to ongoing cuts. But of this total aid, only 13% is allocated to projects that directly or indirectly benefit children, Ruiz points out. However, if only programs aimed directly at children are considered, that percentage drops to 7%.

“Ideally, we would like 100% of development aid to have a focus on children , because everything we discussed in Seville has an impact on children. But we aim for at least 25% to have that focus. We're talking about educational projects, healthcare projects, and the entire social protection system. I don't think it's unreasonable,” explains Vera.

Ideally, we would like 100% of development aid to have a focus on children, because everything we talked about in Seville has an impact on children.

Investing in children and youth is far removed from charity, as it is one of the most profitable operations. Organizations dedicated to children's rights estimate that for every dollar of development aid dedicated to children, there is a 10-dollar economic and social return for the expenditure avoided by not having to repair the damage caused by neglect.

For example, spending on preventing child malnutrition is much cheaper for a government than caring for malnourished children, or implementing measures to prevent violence against minors is cheaper than combating child marriage, exploitation, or the psychological damage that can result from such abuse.

"But the Seville Commitment doesn't clearly state that we must prioritize investing in children as agents of change and that investing in children has a significant social and economic return," Ruiz insists.

Amina J. Mohammed, UN Deputy Secretary-General and Chair of the United Nations Sustainable Development Group, believes that in Seville, opportunities have indeed been opened for innovative financing, such as taxes on first-class air travel, and that "when this funding is directed toward health or education, the first beneficiaries are children." "Even so, there was a lack of more specificity regarding the results to be achieved: child nutrition, health, infant mortality, and disease," she admits.

A “nightmare” context

For UNICEF's Vera, the declaration emerging from this UN conference in Seville is positive and "awakens hope" given the "nightmarish" context marked by "reducing funding and the enormous pressure on multilateralism."

"Is there enough concreteness and ambition? Not yet. We simply have a base to fall back on, and we have to see how all this will translate," he said.

For example, regarding solutions to the debt crisis, one of the most discussed and thorny issues at this Seville summit. “While the sustainability of debt is being discussed in macroeconomic terms, what is at stake is the real access of millions of children to a school, a health center, and a plate of food. Childhood cannot continue to be the price paid in every economic crisis,” several NGOs urged in a joint statement.

The meetings held by NGOs and social movements in Seville also provided an opportunity to share concrete progress in their investment in children. For example, Educo shared with other NGOs a system for preventing child violence that has already been implemented in Spain and now plans to extend to Bolivia and Bangladesh.

Thanks to a software program called Kanjo, 50,000 primary school children expressed how they felt upon entering and leaving class by clicking on various available emoticons that displayed emotions, explained Guiomar Todó, Educo's deputy director general. "It has allowed us to study 35 million emotions and identify 9,000 risk situations, some of which have ended up in social services. UNICEF assessed the success rate and placed it at 81%," she said.