Committee on Development Ordinary meeting Joint meeting Subcommittee on Human Rights
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DEVE European Parliament
Follow its sittingsOlivier De Schutter
To give you just one figure, in the period between 2000 and 2024, a period of 25 years, the richest 1% of the population globally captured 41% of the new wealth that was created globally, whilst the bottom half of humanity, the 50% poorest, captured barely 1% of that wealth. The roadmap is also premised on the finding that growth does not always create jobs, let alone decent jobs. We have many examples of jobless growth around us, and that growth causes further environmental collapse. The idea of green growth, the idea that we could continue to increase total economic output without worsening the environmental crisis, is a myth. We have some examples of jurisdictions that have managed to continue to grow whilst reducing greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change, but that is only one of the nine planetary boundaries that scientists have put forward since 2009, and we have no example of growth that has not further pushed on these planetary boundaries.
So the question becomes, how can we do things differently? How can we escape an ideological approach according to which nothing in the eradication of poverty or reduction of inequalities is possible without first increasing total economic output as measured by GDP? And that is what we call growthism, which in fact provides the wrong compass. It leads to make the wrong policy decisions because we have ways of achieving growth that can be counterproductive if they're not guided by another compass, that of human rights and that of poverty eradication. For example, if you try to achieve growth by flexibilizing labor and weakening labor rights, if you try to create growth by a business-friendly investment climate, reducing taxation on corporations and deregulating economic activity, if you try to create growth by privatizing the commons and public services, or if you try to create growth by unchecked trade and investment liberalization, putting the interests of investors above those of communities, you will create a type of growth that is destructive, extractive, exploitative, and not the kind of growth that is good for poverty eradication.
And so the roadmap tries to present an alternative, and for the developing countries, it means developing multi-year action plans to avoid growth that is destructive, extractive, exploitative in the current international division of labor, in which the long-term objective should be the development of low-income countries, developing countries more generally, without having to depend on infinite growth in OECD countries and benefiting local communities and not only the economic elites. That is the objective of the roadmap with a series of policy proposals that have been discussed over the past 18 months in the years 2025, 2026. The key objective of the roadmap, which has been endorsed by the Human Rights Council on 7th of July, is to create the fiscal and policy space that low-income countries need in order to develop in ways that benefit local communities.
The roadmap has in total six pillars or chapters and one pillar, pillar number five, is dedicated to international economic environments and it contains a series of proposals that move in this direction. We have no time to discuss them in detail, but let me just give you some examples. There is one proposal on the on debt justice and how we can move to a UN debt workout mechanism building on UNCTAD borrowers platform. We recommend that Global South debtors form a coalition to be in a better negotiation negotiation position. We recommend curbing the dominance of private credit rating agencies through multilateral credit rating rating instead.
We recommend the establishment of a clearing integrated monetary area in order to avoid countries having to settle cross-border transactions by using their reserves of hard currencies. We recommend the Global Fund for Social Protection, an expanded use of the special drawing rights of the IMF to provide liquidity facilities to low-income countries and of course we have proposals on the UN Framework Convention on Tax Cooperation and the proposed UN Convention on the Right to Development inter alia. Now, in developing these proposals, we encounter the most significant problem as the problem of the global public debt. And that in all discussions on development and the link between growth and poverty eradication is the elephant in the room. Debt today globally represents 102 trillion US dollars, 102,000 billion US dollars globally, that is the figure of 2024.
And developing countries account for about one third of that total, 31 trillion dollars. But their debt has grown twice as fast than the debt of rich countries since 2010. It has tripled since 2010 and the interest rates that low-income countries pay on their debt are much higher. For average African countries, it's 9.8% interest rate that they pay that they pay on the money that they borrow in order to reimburse their debt, when it's 7.1% for Latin American countries and it's 2.8% to give you an example for the United States of America. That is deeply unjust.
It is explained by the distrust of financial markets towards the ability of these countries to repay their debt. The result is that countries such as Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Egypt dedicate more than one third of their public spending to interest payments on their debt. And in many countries, governments spend more on interest repayments than on healthcare or education. In fact, globally, at least 3.4 billion people live in countries that spend more on interest repayments on their debt than they spend on health or education. Now, this is made even worse by the fact that in development cooperation, more is given in the form of loans rather than grants, worsening the debt situation of low-income countries.
And the result of course is that these countries can only develop by exporting more on global markets. If you want to reimburse your debt labeled in dollars or in euros, you cannot grow sweet potato or cassava for the local communities, you must grow cotton, tobacco, coffee in order to have access to hard currencies to reimburse your debt. So the objective, and I close with this, is really to move away from a form of development that is export-led to move to a form of growth that supports local communities and that benefits poverty reduction, inequalities reduction and not simply the growth of the total output of the economy. Thank you very much and I look forward to our discussion.
Mounir Satouri
Merci Olivier. Je vais donner maintenant la parole en ligne à madame Ovusu Gimpfi pour sept minutes d'intervention. Madame la présidente et directrice générale, c'est à vous. Un petit instant madame, excusez-moi, je vais vous interrompre parce que pour l'instant on ne vous entend pas. Interrompez votre intervention le temps que le problème technique soit réglé.
Comme on est tenu par le temps, si jamais la connexion n'est pas possible tout de suite, ce que je vous propose, Barry, c'est qu'on donne la parole aux membres en attendant que le problème technique soit réglé.
Barry Andrews
Okay, thank you for that, Munir, and we'll just open the floor to the, there's nobody here from EPP, so S&D, Lera, would you like to take the floor please? Thank you.
Leire Pajín
Thank you chair. I'm going to speak in Spanish. Creo que en primer lugar una de las lecciones aprendidas de las diferentes crisis que estamos teniendo y de las que seguramente vendrán es que ninguna alianza verdadera durará si está basada en el interés de una parte sobre otra y esa relación desigual perpetúa la pobreza de la otra. Por tanto necesitamos construir alianzas que realmente se basen en el interés de que haya un verdadero desarrollo del sur global. Creo que a estas alturas estamos todos de acuerdo en la necesidad de mejorar nuestras políticas de desarrollo, que sean más eficientes y que tengan más impacto.
Y también de medir mejor ese impacto, esta mañana hemos hablado mucho de eso. Pero para eso necesitamos primero saber qué es lo importante, qué debemos medir y cuál es el concepto de lo que queremos medir. Y por eso en primer lugar quiero hablar del concepto de progreso, debemos ponernos de acuerdo en qué significa el concepto de progreso y de desarrollo. Y no se puede solo medir, como se ha dicho aquí, a través del producto interior bruto que deja fuera numerosos elementos sobre las verdaderas causas de la pobreza y de la falta de desarrollo. El Programa Nacional, el Programa de Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo lleva muchos años dándonos pistas sobre el camino a seguir.
Habla de la necesidad de medir la multidimensionalidad de la pobreza, de cómo hacerlo en sus informes de desarrollo humano habla claramente de indicadores que midan esa aproximación mucho más multidimensional. Y la Agenda 2030 era un marco que nos aproximaba a esa realidad, hablaba de desarrollo sostenible en términos económicos, sociales y ambientales.
Y desgraciadamente cada vez tenemos menos compromiso con esa agenda y un interés muy claro de desmantelar esos objetivos. En ese contexto pierden además especialmente aquellos países que clasificamos como de renta intermedia, a los que clasificamos como tal solo por el producto interior bruto y los datos macroeconómicos y no tenemos en cuenta sus vulnerabilidades. Por ejemplo, respecto a las catástrofes naturales en regiones como América Latina o el Sudeste Asiático, donde medimos, por ejemplo, que la población hay una población importante que vive por debajo del umbral de la pobreza, pero no contamos con que existen bolsas grandes de personas que están muy poco por encima del umbral de la pobreza y que son tremendamente vulnerables. Por eso yo les quería preguntar cómo cómo integramos esa necesidad de medir la multidimensionalidad de la pobreza en los principales herramientas e instrumentos de desarrollo de la Unión Europea.
Barry Andrews
Okay, thank you very much, Elera, for that. Next is Małgorzata Gosiewska. Madam Gosiewska, you have the floor for ECR.
Małgorzata Gosiewska
Dziękuję bardzo, panie przewodniczący. Pomoc, która pozostawia po sobie silniejsze instytucje, rozwijające się gospodarki, ludność zaangażowaną we własną przyszłość, to sukces. Pomoc, która trafia do krajów instytucji skorumpowanych, bez odpowiedniego monitoringu i kontroli ze strony Unii Europejskiej, to pieniądz wrzucony, można powiedzieć, do studni bez dna. Moim zdaniem kluczowe powinno być wspieranie przejrzystych finansów publicznych i mechanizmów antykorupcyjnych. Bez tego tylko elity będą czerpać korzyści z projektów realizowanych tam.
I pytania do ekspertów: czy i w jaki sposób mierzą państwo ograniczanie korupcji i mobilizowanie dochodów krajowych w projektach pomocowych finansowanych przez Unię Europejską? Jakie widzicie państwo rozwiązania, aby radzić sobie z przypadkami, w których lokalne elity przechwytują zasoby pomocowe i w których projekty pomocowe wykorzystywane są przez skorumpowane rządy na ich własny użytek? Kilka dni temu, szanowni państwo, wróciłam z Rwandy, gdzie między innymi mogłam obserwować, jak funkcjonuje tam jeden z najbardziej zaawansowanych i skutecznych systemów ubezpieczeń zdrowotnych w Afryce. Ponad 85-90% populacji objętych jest tym ubezpieczeniem. Dzięki temu w Rwandzie znacznie spadła śmiertelność okołoporodowa matek i dzieci, ale też wzrosła średnia długość życia przeciętnego obywatela.
I pytanie: czy nie warto pomyśleć nad unijnym wsparciem dla tego typu projektów, czyli właśnie na przykład ubezpieczeń zdrowotnych, zamiast wspierać, finansować ochronę zdrowia, szpitale, na które ostatecznie nie stać przeciętnego obywatela, bo okazuje się, że usługi są płatne? Trafia potem do szpitali prowadzonych przez zgromadzenia zakonne, związki religijne, gdzie pomoc dostaje, a w tych szpitalach, które my często finansujemy, pomoc dla zwykłego obywatela, dla biednego człowieka jest po prostu niedostępna. Więc może warto byłoby się zastanowić nad wspieraniem systemowym, czyli właśnie już tworzenia systemu ubezpieczeń, pomoc osobom niepełnosprawnym, niż bezpośrednie finansowanie instytucji, które dla przeciętnego obywatela są niedostępne.
Barry Andrews
Dziękuję. Now we will go to Charles Goerens for the Renew group. Charles, you have the floor.
Charles Goerens
Merci, Monsieur le Président. Je ne cache pas mon plaisir de pouvoir renouer avec l'expertise d'un habitué de cette maison, Monsieur De Schutter, que nous avons rencontré maintes fois ici. Nous avons toujours été très satisfaits de la des contributions qu'il a apportées à notre travail de base. Depuis notre dernière rencontre, les choses ont profondément changé en Europe, dans le monde, dans cette maison, même au sein de cette commission. Quand on parle encore d'une APD de 0,7 %, on vous considère comme un extraterrestre.
Pourtant, c'est un engagement qui a été pris par la communauté internationale. La politique devient de plus en plus transactionnelle. Elle n'est plus centrée exclusivement, comme on avait l'habitude de le faire, sur la lutte contre la pauvreté, qui était le principe élémentaire, inamovible, semblait-il, dans le passé, par le passé. Donc nous sommes en phase de basculer dans une politique qui ne tient plus la route par rapport à ce que nous ce qu'on avait décidé auparavant. Votre présence ici coïncide avec notre travail sur Global Europe, et je crois qu'il est important de pouvoir influer à travers cette discussion sur les travaux qui vont suivre.
Je terminerai en vous interrogeant sur le problème de la dette. Malheureusement, on n'a pas de temps suffisant pour aborder d'autres problèmes. La dette, de mon point de vue, devrait être partiellement annulée. Il y a d'abord la dette institutionnelle. Je crois que la dette institutionnelle, mon point de vue personnel est le suivant : plutôt que de l'annuler totalement, donnons aux pays débiteurs la possibilité de non pas de rembourser la dette à leurs créanciers, mais de l'investir en monnaie locale dans le développement des secteurs sociaux de base, dans des approches structurelles comme par exemple le développement d'une sécurité sociale qui devrait aller de pair avec les opérations qui sont conçues dans le cadre du Global Europe.
Et puis l'autre dette, moi je reste persuadé que la dette en elle-même n'est pas le problème. C'est la façon dont on prête. Il y a de la dette, il y a de l'argent qui ne devrait pas être prêté. Si c'est à un régime corrompu, on devrait s'en abstenir. Par contre, on devrait être beaucoup plus perspicace dans les priorités à donner, et c'est de mon point de vue l'une des clés de l'implication aussi du secteur privé dans une politique de développement dont la priorité devrait revenir aux décideurs politiques.
Merci.
Barry Andrews
Merci, Charles. Next is Catarina Vieira. Catarina, you have the floor, please, two minutes.
Catarina Vieira
Thank you, Chair. Let me start by saying that I very much congratulate DEVE and DROI for having this discussion, and it's a kind of discussion that I really miss in another committee that I'm part of, which is INTA, and I really would hope that this kind of conversation also takes place there more and more.
I regret that we couldn't hear from our other speaker yet, but we did hear from Mr. De Schutter and he got a very warm applause and it was very earned, this applause, because I mean what you say is not just correct, it's, it's been out there for a while. A lot of what you said is not new, and yet it doesn't make part of the political mainstream and in our actions as the European Union, unfortunately. Degrowth and all of these theories seem something that people read on books over the summer, but then do nothing about in practice. So I guess you laid out the problem very well and very clearly and I would like to ask you in terms of implementation, what do you expect, what would you like to see us as EU member states, as us as the European Union, or in general international community, what next steps do you see to minimize all of the issues that you laid out in your intervention? Because indeed it makes no sense that farmers are going hungry, not growing food but growing export commodities.
That's absolutely for sure. So I guess my question to you is how do we move away from that framework and start promoting real policies that are focused on poverty eradication. And lastly, I don't often get the chance to come to DEVE, so I do say this in DROI quite a bit, but not here, so I'm glad I get the chance to say it here as well. Progress on poverty, health, hunger and inequality is far too slow and we are not on track to meet the 2030 agenda. Also very important to remember that climate change is pushing more and more people into poverty and floods, droughts, extreme weather are destroying livelihoods, homes and essential services, when the poorest people are paying the highest price.
This is also what we've seen very recently in Nepal, very literally in our screens. And again something that has been brought up time and time again, but it's always worth bringing out, the shutdown of USAID has had a tremendous negative impact on human rights around the world and on poverty eradication. So the question really is for us as the EU is how do we step up? We can't fix everything, we can't fill every gap, but we need to see where we can be most impactful to protect the most vulnerable. Thank you very much.
Damien Carême
Thank you, Katharina, and finally we will be joined by our guest speaker just after Damien, so please you have the floor for two minutes.
Merci, Monsieur le Président. Merci beaucoup pour cette belle intervention et surtout pour les préconisations que vous avez remontées aux Nations Unies et auxquelles nous souscrivons pleinement. Comme je souscris d'ailleurs au constat qu'a fait il y a quelques instants Charles Goerens sur les objectifs qui devraient être poursuivis ici à l'Union européenne. Je voudrais revenir sur un point qui me semble essentiel lorsqu'on parle de croissance, d'éradication de la pauvreté ou de développement, c'est la question de savoir qui bénéficie réellement de la richesse produite. Je voudrais zoomer un peu pour cela sur l'Union européenne.
En effet, nous devons nous méfier d'une idée encore très présente dans nos politiques européennes, celle selon laquelle il suffirait d'attirer davantage d'investissement, davantage d'entreprises et davantage de capitaux pour permettre mécaniquement le développement des populations. Or ce modèle pose une question fondamentale : à qui profite réellement cette croissance ? On retrouve aujourd'hui cette logique dans de nombreux dispositifs européens d'aide au développement, notamment dans nos relations avec les pays de la rive sud de la Méditerranée. Une partie de ces politiques repose sur l'implantation d'entreprises européennes, avec l'idée que leur présence permettra de créer des emplois et de stimuler la croissance locale. Mais il faut alors poser une question simple : qui possède et qui contrôle à terme les infrastructures et les activités ainsi développées ?
Car lorsque les entreprises qui investissent conservent la propriété ou la gestion de ces infrastructures, une grande partie de la valeur produite repart vers les actionnaires ou les centres de décision européens, tandis que les populations locales bénéficient principalement des emplois créés, c'est vrai, mais rémunérés suivant les niveaux de salaires locaux. Ici au Parlement européen, on entend souvent certains députés présenter ces dispositifs comme des investissements qui contribuent mécaniquement à la croissance et au développement. Mais si une partie importante de la richesse créée est finalement captée par les acteurs économiques qui investissent, peut-on réellement parler d'un développement partagé ?
Et cette question est d'autant plus importante face au dérèglement climatique. Les populations qui ont le moins contribué au changement climatique sont souvent celles qui en subissent le plus durement les conséquences. Nous ne pouvons donc pas répondre à cette injustice climatique par un modèle de développement qui reproduirait les mêmes inégalités économiques. La question n'est pas seulement de savoir combien de richesses nous produisons, mais qui les possède, qui les contrôle et qui en bénéficie. Cela signifie que nous devons soutenir davantage la création de valeur ajoutée locale, les services publics, la protection sociale, le droit des travailleurs et la capacité des pays partenaires à maîtriser leurs propres ressources et leurs infrastructures.
J'aimerais donc vous interroger sur ce point: comment l'Union européenne peut-elle passer d'une politique de développement principalement fondée sur la croissance et l'attractivité des investissements à une politique qui garantisse réellement que la valeur créée bénéficie aux populations locales? Une phrase, just one sentence. Et surtout, comment faire en sorte que la transition écologique ne reproduise pas les rapports de domination économique existants, mais devienne au contraire un véritable outil de réduction des inégalités et de justice sociale? Merci.
Barry Andrews
Désolé de t'interrompre, mais merci Damien. And we are joined now by Mavis Owusu-Gyamfi, President and CEO of the African Center for Economic Transformation, I hope. So Mavis, if you can hear us and see us, you're very welcome. We have some time constraints, so I give you the floor for seven minutes and thank you once again for joining this joint committee today.
Mavis Owusu-Gyamfi
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and sincere apologies to you and honorable members for the earlier challenge. I hope we will be able to get through this quickly. First of all, thank you for the invitation to speak about how we at ACET think about growth for inclusive, sustainable development and how the EU-Africa relationship must evolve to support it. I'm especially glad to be here because the choices that this Parliament makes on trade, investment, and partnership shapes how quickly Africa as a continent can transform over the next decade. The central thesis of our work at ACET is simple: growth alone is not sufficient.
Africa needs to transform. That growth needs to transform economies, create decent jobs, and ensure that it works for everyone. And that means that the EU has to become a partner in that transformation journey, not just a source of aid. The task is to ensure that we can align our transformative priorities with the EU's development cooperation and the EU's own development priorities. Now, ACET has been making the case for transformation for over a decade.
The data bears it out. Between 2000 and 2020, many African countries grew steadily. GDP went up. Africa was rising. We spoke about that narrative extensively.
But too much of that growth came from exporting raw commodities and the continent riding global price cycles. It was not from building industries that led to jobs for people on the continent. And time and time again, we have seen that that kind of growth is not resilient when shocks hit the continent, and there are global shocks. And that is why we developed something called growth with depth, the type of growth that enables us as a continent to diversify our economies, enhance our export competitiveness, increase our productivity, effectively use technology, and most importantly, ensures that it leads to human well-being, which is something we heard earlier on from one of the parliamentarians. It's a framework that we use to assess how countries on the continent are transforming.
And our last transformation index showed that, you know, the continent is not transforming. The index looked at 30 countries on the continent that represent 87% of the continent's GDP. And the average score on the continent, unfortunately, was 30.3 out of 100. Two decades of data showed that our transformation barely moved.
Now let me just talk you, bring it to life for you with three countries. Tunisia scores highest in our index. When we looked at transformation in Tunisia in detail, it showed that they had really improved their export competitiveness, and they had done this built on decades of investment in manufacturing and trade integration with the rest of the world. Kenya is more like the average country in Africa. Yes, it's diversified.
It has a high services-driven economy. But that services-driven economy is predominantly low services. Its manufacturing base is shrinking and it is not competitive globally. It relies on exports such as tourism, ICT and finance. And as soon as there's a global crisis, given where they are in the service chain, it drags them down.
Niger, it scored 11.9 out of 100. It went down more than 10 points from 2000. Now its growth comes from weather-dependent agriculture and raw commodity extraction. There is very little diversification, which leaves the country weak across almost every dimension of transformation. Now one of the things we all know, and I don't have to tell the honorable parliamentarians this, transformation is not automatic.
It isn't the same as growth. It is a deliberate choice that countries and their partners need to make. They need to make the deliberate choice to diversify their economies and invest in being competitive globally. They need to industrialize and they need to access robust technology. Now that transformation ultimately is about human well-being.
It's about making sure our young people who are increasingly the majority of our population have decent jobs. And it's about making sure that women and girls who are half of our population are equitably included in the economy. But our research unfortunately shows that countries can transform without necessarily realizing this gender equity. I talked about Tunisia earlier on. Tunisia is making great progress on transformation.
Unfortunately, they have not been intentional in embedding gender equity into that transformation, so their gender indicators are low. Morocco has outpaced progress on the same measures. Again, they are not making intentional progress on gender equality. So when we look at their transformation, gender equality is not catching up with it. Then we have countries who are making progress on gender equality by investing in it.
Unfortunately, we do not see the transformation progress that we hope to see in those countries. Then we come to jobs. Growth can, countries can grow without creating any jobs. We've seen that in Africa. A lot of African countries have grown and at best have created low-quality jobs.
What we are finding on the continent that ironically and employment is not our challenge, decent work is our challenge. We have a lot of young people in jobs, but those jobs do not pay a fair wage, they do not offer security, they do not offer a path upwards so that our citizens have access. invests beyond growth. It really looks at how you support Africa's transformation.
So how must EU's relationship with Africa evolve to support that transformation agenda? Let me offer three ways. And this three, these three ways are drawn on work that we are collaborating on on the future of development cooperation. And there are, and we've had extensive consultations on the continent and looked at a lot of data. So I'd like to share three things.
First.
Barry Andrews
Just bear in mind we are a little bit short on time, so maybe, I'm sorry to interrupt. Thank you so much.
Mavis Owusu-Gyamfi
I'll pick three. So three things. One, invest in regional production systems. The focus on countries is not sufficient. We need to look at a Europe-Africa partnership that really helps Africa realize the ambitions of the African Continental Free Trade Area.
Second, deploy finance predictably and at transformation and look at long-term finance. The three-year cycles do not work. And finally, let me be forthright, we need mutual accountability. It's about Africa and EU sitting together to agree what our respective continents need. It's not about EU setting the target, sharing it with us and calling it mutual accountability.
So I hope that this is the beginning of a dialogue that really looks at the benefit of Africa-EU relationships because when Africa develops, EU benefits. When Africa fails to transform, we are on your doorstep, you don't benefit. Thank you.
Barry Andrews
Well done, Mavis, thank you, sorry to interrupt and I couldn't agree more with your sentiments there in conclusion. So thank you very much for bearing with us as well with the technical issues. So now we go back to Professor Schutter to respond, again we're under time limits, the interpreters are available until 12:35, so three or four minutes because we have to hear from the Commission and the EAS. Thank you, Professor.
Olivier De Schutter
I'll be very brief, thank you so much and I first would like to acknowledge the excellent intervention we just heard from Owusu-Gyamfi Mavis from the African Center for Economic Transformation with which I completely, I completely agree on the need to move beyond a naive approach that growth will necessarily deliver on human development outcomes. Ms. Pajin mentioned the need for other indicators of progress including the multidimensional poverty measurement of the UNDP. It's important, but let us not forget, when you fall from an airplane, it's not enough to have an altimeter indicating how fast you're falling. It's also important to have a parachute to slow things down and to change course. And whereas we have within the UN a very robust dashboard of indicators on sustainable and inclusive well-being, if we don't change our ways of doing things, if we don't draw the consequences from what we measure, we will, we will fail.
So it's really important to move beyond a debate on measuring progress beyond GDP. How to do this? Many questions from the members of the Parliament revolved on the proposals that could be made. I think the idea to convert the debt into commitments for development is an important one. We worked on debt-for-social-protection swaps, for example, which is to, to forgive part of the debt against the commitment to reinvest that in social protection.
It's promising, but the amounts that could be leveraged are probably not sufficient, it's not the magic bullet one might hope, but it's certainly a way forward to encourage states rather than to penalize them for investing in healthcare, education, social protection. They fear to do this today, it's not part of their priorities because they fear to worsen their fiscal balance.
We need instead to provide them with positive incentives to do so. There were questions from Catarina Vieira and Margarita Gosiewska on how to focus on country-led development. I think it's really what we need to do to encourage forms of development that are participatory. That is the best way to avoid the aid money being captured by corrupt elites, to do participatory development strategies focused on well-being, the creation of decent jobs, the diversification of the economy to move beyond the existing international division of labor, which indeed Damien Carême is entirely correct is not delivering. So with this I would like to close, saying if we focus our development efforts only on improving competitiveness, attracting investment, building export competitiveness without looking at economic transformation, we will fail to provide a sustainable future for African countries.
Thank you.
Barry Andrews
Excellent, thank you Professor Shutter. And now we are joined by the DG INTPA, in particular Alexandra Zissapoulou, who is deputy head of unit at sustainable development policy. Alexandra, thank you for joining us. I will say two minutes as we are under severe time constraint. I'm really apologize, but unfortunately the interpretation will cease very soon.
Alexandra Zissapoulou
Thank you chair, and thank you to our distinguished speakers. We have heard your message very loud and very clear. It is not only about growth, and growth must be assessed. It must be assessed by its sustainability, it must be assessed by its resilience and the impact on human well-being. The European Union remains committed to all this by our treaties, by the international frameworks to which we have subscribed, and also by our secondary legislation.
Our mission is clear. Development cooperation is not about how much growth is generated, it's about what kind of growth, who benefits from this growth, and whether it strengthens the rights and respects the environment. What is less straightforward is how we can achieve this in an increasingly tense and competitive global environment. Well, first by the Global Gateway. You have heard about this a lot.
What sets it apart is that it's not a growth-at-any-cost agenda. It's a values-based agenda that looks into creating local production. I have in mind the example of the MAV+ program that promises to have 60% production of vaccines locally in Africa by 2040. It's an agenda that looks into creating decent jobs. We have targeted programs for that, for example in Bangladesh.
And it is an agenda that is implemented in a 360-degree approach. Along with investments in hard infrastructure, we also promote and support an enabling environment, looking into local and women entrepreneurship, in building regulatory frameworks, in supporting institutions. And we measure all this. We apply an inequality marker in all our actions, and we also start rolling out distributional impact assessment to know who exactly benefits from our actions.
Global Gateway is not the only thing we do. We also remain committed in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. We have the new staff working document on a diversified approach on fragility. And we also contribute to vertical funds in order to face the transboundary challenges like health and education. So to conclude very fast, we subscribe to the insights we heard.
We act in this regard, but alone we cannot do much. This needs to be an international commitment. Thank you.
Barry Andrews
Thank you very much, Alexander, for that. And Helena Boguslavska is Deputy Head of Mission for Human Rights with the External Action Service. Helena, you're welcome again. My apologies for the short time available. Thank you.
Helena Boguslavsky
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I wish to echo my colleague from INTPA also thanking the two panelists for their insights. Today the EU is under geopolitical pressure to be competitive economically on the global level. We recognize this. But we at the same time we seek to maintain our leading role in promoting human rights and democracy. And in order to avoid making mistakes that we cannot afford, such concrete evidence-based strategies like this roadmap that Mr. De Schutter presented are very helpful.
And we also thank Mrs. Owusu-Gyamfi for her very interesting analysis and examples. We are very concerned that multiple and interdependent crises continue to affect disproportionately persons living in poverty and in vulnerable situations, both in Europe and also around the world. I would like to recall that last May the European Commission adopted a first-ever EU anti-poverty strategy that among others seeks to address child poverty, housing inequalities, and also inclusion of persons with disabilities. In our external action, we also through our development assistance, through our human rights actions and other types of external action, we strive to pursue a comprehensive approach to the realization of all human rights: civil, cultural, economic, political, and social rights. Among others, it included supporting the development of the international frameworks to acknowledge rights like the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, and also to support responsible business practices.
Implementing a human rights-based approach to all our international partnerships is a commitment that will continue also in the next multiannual financial framework, and it's just a starting point. So in conclusion, our interest and our values are not a trade-off. Growth doesn't come from short-term action. And in order for European investments to be sustainable, we very much agree that they must respect human dignity, they must make people's lives better across the board, and not just feed the economy. Thank you.
Mounir Satouri
Merci. Merci aux intervenants, merci aux membres, au SEAE et à la Commission. Tout cela finalement vient confirmer que les droits humains sont indispensables au développement économique. C'est pour ça que les débats qu'on va avoir, cher Barry, dans les prochaines semaines sur le Global Europe et la question du financement et comment on consacre des financements dédiés, vérifiables sur la dimension et de développement et de droits humains est essentiel. Et donc si on veut réussir les ambitions de lutte contre la pauvreté en Afrique en 2030, on doit l'associer forcément à la question de droits humains.
Et si on veut que l'intervention de l'Europe soit crédible, il faut que les moyens financiers soient au rendez-vous. Merci à toutes et à tous. Merci aux interprètes de nous avoir donné cette latitude et bon appétit aux unes et aux autres.