Devex Newswire: Does European aid have an image problem?

The European Union says it’s done a whole lot for Africa — and wants to be recognized for that good work — but admits it’s done a bad job of conveying it.

Also in today’s edition: Health care gets real about artificial intelligence.

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PR problem

Impressions matter. The outgoing boss of the European Commission’s development department wishes Africa had a better impression of how much the EU has done for it.

“Taking into account how much funding we provide to our partners in the global south, and the fact that we are still the biggest [official development assistance] provider in the world, I think we have not been able to communicate about it enough — or I would say, so strongly, as I hoped,” Jutta Urpilainen said in an interview with the Center for Global Development.

Indeed, the bloc is a donor powerhouse. The EU institutions and its member states accounted for €95.9 billion ($104.9 billion), or 42% of total ODA from the top Western donors in 2023, as measured by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

EU Commission surveys show that “even though we have been one of the biggest donors in many of our partner countries — for instance, in Africa — the citizens in those countries do not recognize that,” Urpilainen said.

My colleague Vince Chadwick said that one study showed how recognition for the EU brand and projects in some African countries ranked behind awareness of China, the United States, France, World Health Organization, and the United Nations.

Urpilainen said that her successor should make changing this narrative their “highest priority.” That likely successor, former Czech Industry and Trade Minister Jozef Síkela, seems to agree.

Earlier this month, Síkela met with the Luxembourger member of EU Parliament Charles Goerens, who is one of the most long-standing and engaged members of the parliament’s development committee.

“As European efforts often remain not recognised by local populations,” Goerens posted on social media afterward, “we agreed that the [EU] needs to boost the visibility of its development aid around the world and improve its policy coherence.”

Read: Europe wants ‘recognition’ for its aid to Africa (Pro)

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Gateway to profits

The EU has in particular struggled to sell its “Global Gateway,” its quasi-answer to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which focuses largely on infrastructure. For a cringy reminder of those struggles, check out this virtual PR flop that went viral after Vince reported on it.

Critics say a lot of the gateway funds are just recycled money. They also say it’s predicated on a geostrategic self-interested approach to aid — i.e., scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.

That impression wasn’t aided by a civil society analysis warning that the €300 billion ($330 billion) Global Gateway “risks diverting the aid budget to big business” at the expense of poverty reduction in low-income countries, my colleague Rob Merrick writes.

The study found that in 25 of 40 projects examined — more than 60% — European firms including Siemens, BioNTech, car giant Möller Group, and utility company Suez are beneficiaries, some enjoying seats on the gateway’s business advisory group.

Only 16% of all schemes invest in the key development areas of health and education, with priority given instead to the energy, transport, and digital sectors, the report by the Eurodad and Counter Balance networks states.

The European Commission also comes under fire for projects providing loans rather than grants and for alleged secrecy surrounding contracts, financing, and assessments.

“When we tried to look into the projects, we found an extremely worrying lack of information,” Farwa Sial of Eurodad says. “We are concerned that what we have been able to uncover and analyze is only the tip of the iceberg.”

Read: EU’s Global Gateway ‘risks diverting aid budget to big business’

There’s no AI in team … or is there?

Artificial intelligence will remake so many industries, but perhaps one of the biggest is health care. Its potential is vast, as we report in our special downloadable on five innovations in global health.

By 2030, the World Economic Forum predicts AI will be used extensively to detect disease patterns and risks, improve the efficiency of health centers, and decrease patient waiting times.

For example, AI is already being used to prepare for the next pandemic. CEPI and its partners are using it to brace for “Disease X,” an unknown pathogen that could cause the next global health emergency. Disease X is likely to come from one of 25 virus families, and there can be thousands of viruses within each virus family. But instead of humans sifting through data, researchers can train machine learning models to help them process and analyze it.

“These AI models keep getting better, better and better, and we’re at the beginning of a potential seismic shift,” says Anne Stake, chief strategy and product officer at Medtronic LABS, during a Devex event. “If designed thoughtfully, with stakeholders like community health workers, patients, and communities themselves, we think that AI could be a powerful force in both delivering better population health outcomes, lowering cost, and improving efficiency at the last mile.”

+ Devex readers interested to read more about this and other emerging lifesaving tools in global health can download our free report: 5 innovations in global health.

Wiki situation

AI could also upend what over two decades ago was considered a virtual revolution: Wikipedia. With ChatGPT giving us answers to seemingly every question under the sun, what’s left for the world’s most ubiquitous online encyclopedia?

I recently met with Maryana Iskander, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit charitable arm that hosts Wikipedia, and she told me that she tries not to sweat AI too much.

She went so far as to argue that for now, a lot of AI is “slop,” the commonly used term for digital clutter that prioritizes speed and volume over quality and trust.

“So basically, as the internet is flooded with slop, we have become more valuable as a source for accurate information,” she said, adding that “we have not seen a reduction in our page views” — which number about a billion visitors a month.

That swagger perhaps stems from the human element behind all those Wikipedia pages.

“For us,” she said, “the human motivation to create content is something we have to fuel and keep alive, so that these hundreds of thousands of volunteers want to keep doing this and want to keep adding to the world's knowledge. And if all you're doing is writing stuff that's going to get reused by AI, I don't know.”

Read: Wikipedia relies on army of volunteers as it stares down AI

Opinion corner

• A new public health emergency. A slow, inequitable global response. Stigma. Misinformation. Nationalism. The burden falling on the poorest and most vulnerable. Sound familiar? Mandeep Dhaliwal, director of the HIV and health group at the U.N. Development Programme, argues that mpox echoes the AIDS and COVID-19 pandemics. “History repeating itself is not inevitable, but a choice,” she writes.

• As climate change affects our health, cities are in the crosshairs. Each year, extreme heat alone claims nearly half a million lives, while severe weather patterns drive outbreaks of diseases such as malaria. But as Dr. Naveen Rao of the Rockefeller Foundation points out: “In the face of this daunting challenge, cities — home to more than half of the world’s population — are uniquely positioned to lead the charge against climate-related health risks.”

• A Codex Planetarius? Sounds like a newly discovered dinosaur. It’s actually a new way of addressing the health of the environment — specifically standards to reduce the key environmental impacts of producing globally traded food, Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund explains.

In other news

The world’s 26 lowest-income countries are facing their highest debt levels since 2006 and are increasingly vulnerable to natural disasters and shocks, the World Bank reported. [Al Jazeera]

One year after Hamas attacked Israel, aid workers in Gaza expressed growing despair over the U.N.’s failure to protect its staff, with nearly 230 UNRWA staffers among the hundreds of humanitarian and health workers killed in the war. [Politico]

The IMF has reduced surcharges following criticism that they unfairly burden highly indebted nations such as Argentina, Ecuador, Egypt, and Ukraine during a time of rising interest rates. [Bloomberg]

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