The European Court of Auditors believes that the EU needs to do more to equip its citizens with digital skills, as it promised to do in its skills strategy (see EUROPE 12518/1). This is what has emerged from an analysis document published on Tuesday 23 February.
As a reminder, the European Commission has set itself the objective of increasing the percentage of citizens with basic digital skills to 70% by 2025, a figure that amounted to 56% in 2019. Therefore, it estimated that the realisation of this strategy would require an inflow of public and private funds of €48 billion per year.
However, the auditors of the European Court of Auditors note that this objective may be difficult to achieve. It notes that little progress has been made in recent years in improving adults’ basic digital skills. Moreover, funding for capacity building has so far been relatively “modest”. According to available data, it represented 2% of European Social Fund (ESF) funding for the 2014-2020 period. Similarly, in Erasmus+, adult digital skills projects accounted for only a small percentage of total funding.
The European Court of Auditors’ analysis document is not the result of an audit, but of an analysis of information, most of which is public. It does not include an assessment of the measures taken by the Commission in the area under review nor any recommendations. However, at the end of the report, the auditors clearly suggest that the Commission should work with “intermediate values” (over time) and “precise target values” (by Member State), with a view to achieving the objective of 70% of citizens with basic digital skills by 2025.
Link to analysis document n.02/2021: https://bit.ly/2MgMSZu (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)