According to a working document obtained by Agence Europe on Wednesday 15 January, a complete overhaul of the network of EU delegations dedicated to international partnerships (INTPA network) is envisaged with the stated aim of adapting to a “new geopolitical context”.
The reform aims to strengthen the teams’ specialisation by regionalising some of the delegations’ activities across Africa, Latin America and Asia.
The current configuration is deemed insufficient to effectively support the EU’s ‘Global Gateway’ strategy, its vast investment programmes and the expansion of portfolios linked to the “growing importance of the external dimension” of EU policies and its impact on partner countries. The Green Deal, migration and security are among the priorities mentioned.
“The budgetary constraints require us to make savings by increasing efficiencies”, explain the authors of the document.
In practical terms, the INTPA sections of the EU delegations would concentrate exclusively on policies, relieved of budgetary management, while the implementation of financial programmes would be centralised in 18 “INTPA Budget Implementation Hubs”.
Each delegation would include a “Partnerships Section” made up of small teams to steer local strategic relations and coordinate with the regional hubs. In some countries, operations would be supervised directly from the hubs, with no local deployment.
Based on specific budgetary and operational criteria, 10 INTPA hubs have been identified in Africa: - Dakar (Senegal); -Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire); - Accra (Ghana); - Yaoundé (Cameroon); - Kinshasa (DRC); - Addis Ababa (Ethiopia); - Kigali (Rwanda); - Nairobi (Kenya); - Lusaka (Zambia); - Pretoria (South Africa).
In Latin America and the Caribbean, the hubs will be set up in Panama City (Panama), Bridgetown (Barbados), Bogota (Colombia) and Buenos Aires (Argentina).
Finally, Tashkent (Uzbekistan), Bangkok (Thailand), New Delhi (India) and Suva (Fiji) would be the EU’s budgetary hubs in Asia.
See the working document: https://aeur.eu/f/f24 (Original version in French by Bernard Denuit)