The European Union (EU) Commission is giving Barbados and other Caribbean Community (CARICOM) member states the assurance that it will not abandon them in time of need, as changes are made to its funding model for the region.
Following the end of the more than €30 billion valued 11th European Development Fund (EDF), which covered the period 2014-2020 with aid to African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) state with national and regional programmes, the EU has taken the decision to implement a new system focusing more on regional assistance.
This was explained at the end of a recent visit to Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, St Lucia and the OECS Secretariat by EU officials from Brussels Myriam Ferran, Deputy Director-General for International Partnerships, and Brian Glynn, the Managing Director for the Americas in the European External Action Service.
During the mission, the officials examined several areas for cooperation over the next seven years, now that the EU has adopted new regulations and is entering into a new budgetary cycle.
Stating that the priority for the region was “equally recognised” in the new financing framework and upcoming funding cycle, Ferran said discussions with Prime Minister Mia Mottley and her regional counterparts involved explanation on “how the new legal framework would work and what the possibilities for cooperation and financial assistance from the European Union to the Caribbean islands would be”.
Areas of climate change, sustainable economic growth and development, security, and human development are among those areas considered a priority.
Myriam said the new financial framework being adopted by the EU Commission to help the Caribbean covers the period 2021-2027.
In explaining the move to drop the EDF and incorporate funding to the region into an overall budget for ACP states, Myriam said the aim was to have simplification and move away from having multiple financial instruments to just having one main one.
“We merge more than 10 financing instruments into one single one which we call Neighbourhood Development and International Cooperation Instrument (NDICI), better known as Global Europe,” she said.
“This means that there is no more separation between what used to be the EDF for the Caribbean and the DCI (Development Cooperation Instrument) for other countries. It was really for centralisation and simplification. It also means that now cooperation between countries, independent of their level of development, is easier,” she added.
Stating that this move now allowed for all financing from the EU budget to follow the same rules, Myriam further explained that there will be no set national allocations in the new framework for countries considered by the EU as high-income or upper-middle-income countries, as was the case with the EDF.
“It means that countries like Barbados which is qualified as a high income or middle-income country can benefit from the same programmes as others,” she said.
However, Myriam also pointed out that while under the new funding model with a regional allocation of some €208 million from a larger pool of funds it will favour “regional or multi-country actions”, there was still scope for some national assistance.
“If there are activities that are identified at the national level that deserve support this is completely eligible. The fact that we don’t have any pre-allocated envelope for each country doesn’t mean you cannot have activities decided at the national level. It just means you don’t have a specific allocation for those. It will be demand-driven and the objective is to select the most efficient activities, giving priority to regional activity and select what is needed at the regional level,” she explained.
Myriam also pointed to the need for the private sector to play a greater role in augmenting donor funding for projects that aid national and regional development.
Meanwhile, Glynn said the EU wanted to maintain a strong relationship with the Caribbean, recognising that “particularly in the pandemic period that relationship was harder to manage simply because we could not come here.”
“We have heard the message loud and clear that high-level political engagement between the European Union and not just Barbados but all of the countries of the Caribbean is something that is necessary, and all of the big challenges that we face we have to face them together.
“One message we want to pass on is that with the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union, the Caribbean still has strong advocates within the European Union,” assured Glynn, who acknowledged Barbados for its advocacy on climate issues. (MM)
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