Ministers say that Global Gateway should be a ‘core element’ of the bloc’s development offer – but have urged the EU Commission to be more transparent in how projects are selected.
Benjamin Fox
The EU’s flagship foreign investment programme Global Gateway must become far more transparent, governments have urged the European Commission in their first formal position on the scheme.
In conclusions agreed earlier this week, EU ministers described the Global Gateway as a “positive and comprehensive offer”.
But details on projects and how they are actually financed have been thin on the ground.
The 27 said that there was a “need for clearer and more transparent project selection” along with “regular reporting…and enhanced monitoring of results and impact.”
A similar message has come from MEPs. “Hardly any Europeans have ever even heard of this strategy, which claims to have mobilised over €400bn in investment,” said Barry Andrews, the chair of the parliament’s development committee.
The conclusions amount to the first formal position on the Global Gateway taken by EU governments, five years after the launch of the initiative.
The EU commission has marketed Global Gateway as its “values-based” alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
But the EU scheme has a fraction of China’s financial firepower. Over the last 10 years, the BRI has spent about $1.3 trillion (€1trillion) on infrastructure and over $500bn on non-financial sector projects compared with the Global Gateway’s pledged target to raise over €300bn in infrastructure finance, both private and public sector, by 2027.
Its flagship project is the so-called ‘Lobito Corridor‘, a rail network designed to connect Angola to Zambia’s copper-fields to foreign markets, backed by €4bn from the EU and United States.
The corridor “will cut the journey from the centre of the continent to the port from 45 days to just one week,” commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said at the gathering.
It combines two priorities in the EU’s African strategy; an offer to invest in infrastructure and the EU’s search for the minerals to power its green transition.
But in February, MEPs warned that it was unclear how the EU executive had raised billions of euros for projects across the world.
