According to the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, the funds will be used to finance clean investments from an environmental perspective, without endangering the sovereignty of the recipient states.
From a pragmatic perspective, the EU’s positioning is seen as a geostrategic response to other powers, particularly to the international advance of China’s New Silk Road initiatives.
“The goal of Global Gateway is to empower countries to vote better. Because for many countries around the world, investment opportunities are not only limited, they also all come with a lot of fine print and very high costs,” claimed von der Leyen.
No country, he acknowledged, should face a situation where the only way to finance its essential infrastructure is to sell its future.
“Global Gateway is big enough to make a difference. And, just as importantly, it establishes a new approach to large infrastructure projects,” he commented.
According to him, the plan supported projects to produce vaccines, install solar and wind farms, and lay fiber optic cables under the Black Sea to Georgia and Central Asia, or connect railway and power networks in the Western Balkans, Moldova and Ukraine.
In addition, there will be “announcements and signatures worth hundreds of millions of euros” in the next 24 hours, the official announced.
Since Global Gateway was founded in 2021, the EU has already made financial commitments of 66 billion euros in various projects, almost half of them through grants; All of this is due to the bloc’s budget, without taking into account the efforts of member states and private financing, he explained.
Currently, he explained, strategic economic corridors are being established in southern Africa to connect the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
mgt/mjm