MEPs have urged the European Commission to rethink its ‘Global Gateway’ investment scheme, warning that it was unclear how the EU executive had raised billions of euros for projects across the world. 

“We want to work with the commission to make it a success, but we need a lot more transparency on the projects involved, their funding and all impact assessments,” Barry Andrews, the Irish liberal MEP, told EUobserver after the development committee, which he chairs, backed its highly critical report on Wednesday (25 February). 

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 ($800bn) 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. 

Across Africa, for example, the commission says that Global Gateway will lead to €150bn of investment, but less than €10bn is being put up in guarantees in the EU budget. 

MEPs also believed that “project selection is overly centralised and top-down. We favour a model in which demand in partner countries is matched with offers from European businesses,” Andrews said. 

“Hardly any Europeans have ever even heard of this strategy, which claims to have mobilised over €400bn in investment,” said Andrews.

“Clearly that must change,” he said.

Global Gateway also urges the commission to use a model in which demand in partner countries is matched with offers from European businesses.

Andrews and other MEPs have complained that otherwise EU project finance was used to grant tenders to companies from China and other rival powers.  

There is also frustration about the opacity of the programme, and how money is actually being raised for projects, with the committee report stating that it “deplores the lack of clarity and transparency regarding the funding track record and how the figure of €306bn was reached”.

Elsewhere, MEPs recommended that Global Gateway should offer “debt-for-nature or debt-for-climate swaps” and that EU officials should make sure that any projects do not create more debt for poor countries. 

The ‘Lobito Corridor’, a rail network designed to connect Angola to Zambia’s copper-fields to foreign markets, is the commission’s flagship project under Global Gateway.

It was touted as such last October when the EU executive hosted South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa and Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame at a summit in Brussels. 

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. 

However, long stretches of the railway in eastern Congo aren’t working and neither are the trains that are supposed to run on the network. 

Meanwhile, Congolese officials in the Katanga region say they aren’t close to running goods trains to service heavy industry that could take on manufacturing and processing. 

Though the report is not legally binding on the commission, it underscores the uneasiness held by many lawmakers about the way that the EU is promoting Global Gateway as a diplomatic tool. 

The report is set to be finalised at the Parliament’s March plenary session.