Romania’s motorways, water networks, schools, hospitals and digital public services now bear the imprint of two decades of European Union funding. A Digi24 commentary published on Wednesday warns that this very success risks producing the country’s next strategic error: the belief that EU grants can endlessly substitute for an economy.

The caution arrives as Brussels negotiates its next seven-year budget. The European Commission’s proposal for the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) 2028-2034, tabled in July 2025, commits nearly €2 trillion (about $2.2 trillion, or roughly KES 296 trillion at recent rates near KES 148 to the euro) in current prices. Member states and the European Parliament are still haggling over the figures, and Bucharest’s share of them will shape Romanian public investment deep into the 2030s.

What the Proposed Budget Contains

The proposal keeps cohesion policy and agriculture at its core, channelled through national and regional partnership plans tied more closely to investments, reforms and measured results, with guarantees for less developed regions. Alongside them sits a markedly larger push for technology, industrial capacity and security.

European Commission proposal for the 2028-2034 Multiannual Financial Framework, at current pricesBudget lineProposed allocationApproximate value in Kenyan shillingsNational and Regional Partnership Plans (cohesion and agriculture)€865 billionAbout KES 128 trillionCompetitiveness and research€451 billionAbout KES 67 trillionOf which Horizon Europe research programme€175 billionAbout KES 26 trillionDefence and space€131 billionAbout KES 19 trillion

These numbers remain proposals. The final framework will be amended in negotiation among member states and the Parliament, but the commentary argues the political direction is already set.

The Absorption Trap

The Digi24 commentary, part of the broadcaster’s Agora opinion series, concedes that EU funds changed Romania. They financed roads, water networks, public transport, schools, hospitals, administrative digitalisation and investment by tens of thousands of enterprises, cutting the cost of modernisation and accelerating convergence with Western Europe. Given the country’s enormous infrastructure deficit, organising development policy around EU money was necessary, the column argues.

But it draws a hard line between administrative absorption and economic policy. An absorption rate, the commentary argues, tells Romanians only how much of an allocation was spent. It does not say how much value added stayed in Romania, how much private capital was mobilised, how many local suppliers emerged, how many new products were exported, or which skills and technologies remained in the country. Romania can import high-performing technology without ever acquiring the capacity to produce or maintain it.

“A grant can build a motorway, but it cannot create the destination,” the commentary observes.

The column extends the logic to industry. EU money can finance an industrial park without automatically producing competitive firms, and it can modernise a farm without building the chain that runs from raw material through processing, distribution, branding and export.

Brussels Is Making the Same Pivot

The direction of travel in the proposed budget reinforces the diagnosis. According to the figures cited in the commentary, digital investment is set to grow fivefold, and funding for clean technologies, the bioeconomy and decarbonisation sixfold. The Commission proposes €451 billion for competitiveness and research, including €175 billion for Horizon Europe, and €131 billion for defence and space, roughly KES 67 trillion, KES 26 trillion and KES 19 trillion respectively. The commentary reads this as an unmistakable message: the EU no longer pursues only the reduction of gaps between regions, but the reconstruction of its own capacity to produce technologies, energy equipment, medicines, chips, defence systems and digital infrastructure.

A Warning with Echoes in East Africa

The Romanian debate maps directly onto challenges facing East African economies that likewise lean heavily on concessional finance. Kenya, whose Economic Partnership Agreement with the EU entered into force in July 2024, faces the same structural question the commentary poses: donor and grant funding can build ports, roads and power lines, but it does not by itself create processors, brands, exports or firms. The EU’s Global Gateway strategy, launched in December 2021 with a stated ambition to mobilise up to €300 billion (about KES 44 trillion) in investments by 2027, replicates the same logic at continental scale, and its success will depend on whether funded infrastructure anchors domestic value chains rather than merely opening them.

For policymakers in Nairobi, Kampala and Dar es Salaam, the Romanian lesson is measurable. Judge development finance by the value retained in the economy, the suppliers created and the exports added, not by the share of an allocation that was disbursed.

Funds Buy Capital and Time

The commentary distills its argument into a single sentence, translated from the Romanian original: “EU funds can buy capital and time. They cannot take the place of an economic model.” Its demand for the 2028-2034 negotiations is that Romania ask not only how many billions it receives, but what kind of economy it builds with them.

That is the test now before both Bucharest and Brussels. As the framework moves through negotiation, the measure of success will not be how much Romania absorbs, but what productive capacity, firms and skills remain once the money is spent.