European Commissioner for International Partnerships Jutta Urpilainen wants the midterm review of the EU’s development policy and the ‘NDICI-Global Europe’ budget to be based on an inequality marker.
“After 3 years of very hard work with experts from academia and research, we launched, in June, the inequality marker. [...] I have also instructed my DG and my services to use this marker also in our midterm review while we are [conducting] this exercise on this programming and our programmes [development cooperation programmes—Ed.]. [...] Collectively, we have the resources; we have expertise [...] to tackle inequalities. Matching them with political will [...] will enable us to have [a] really meaningful impact”, declared the commissioner, who is a social democrat, on Tuesday, 10 October, during a seminar organised at the European Parliament by the S&D group on the theme of “Tackling Inequality: Paving the way for a sustainable future”—her sights set on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 10.
According to Mrs Urpilainen, the EU’s Global Gateway strategy—with its potential €300 billion in investments in digital connectivity, transport, and clean energy in low- and middle-income partner countries by 2027—is working towards equity.
“The bottom 40% receive less than 25% of the overall income. This is not defendable”, warned Udo Bullmann (S&D, German), who felt that, with respect to SDG 10, the Global North and the Global South must “work together for this future on equal footing”.
Tanya Cox, director of the NGO network CONCORD, stated, “We were advocating for [such an indicator] since 2020 when we saw how Covid-19 was impacting [...] inequalities”. [The marker] is thus welcome, but it should be “obligatory for all [development] actors, [including] Member States”, and be “complemented by specific policies, [...] redistributive policies, for example”, and its beneficiaries should be from the bottom 40% of the income scale.
She also called for Global Gateway to be based not just on large companies but on microenterprises as well. She went on to say that a win-win partnership “will reduce the impact for our partner countries.” (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)