Accessing private sector finance to support digital rights organisations in the Global South can be tricky – but APC is hoping that the European Commission’s Global Gateway strategy may be a chance to do this in a way that is aligned with the organisation’s values and goals.
The Global Gateway offers what it calls a “grant and loan” funding mix. It channels funds from European Union (EU) member states and finance institutions, and has also become the main source of social responsibility financing from EU businesses, which are encouraged to invest their money abroad within the framework of the EU’s foreign policy development objectives.
This is, for APC’s Carlos Rey-Moreno, a “paradigm shift”, with the private sector placed at the centre of development funding. “It makes civil society participation in the Gateway more important,” he says.
APC is well positioned to try to influence just where the money gets spent. In January this year, it was appointed as the chair of an advisory group set up to inform the allocation of some of the funds channelled through the Gateway – already amounting to hundreds of billions of euros in development financing. The civil society and academia advisory group, or CSAG, has some 70 members representing “civil society organisations, umbrella networks, think tanks, and research centres. It is part of what the Global Gateway calls its D4D Hub, or “digital for development” hub.
The chair is a strategic position for APC, which has for some time been looking at how to unlock innovative financing mechanisms for community-centred connectivity initiatives across the Global South.
Now, through the Global Gateway, where APC also participates as one of 57 members in the Civil Society and Local Authorities Advisory Platform, it hopes to do its part in helping to shape the development commitments of EU businesses and institutions, and to align these commitments with APC’s strategic emphasis on digital inclusion.
“With digital resources and infrastructures (both material and symbolic) concentrated to an extraordinary degree in the hands of a few, identifying areas, territories, issues and actors – particularly collective ones – on the peripheries in the Global South which have the potential for scalability and significant impact is an urgent challenge,” says APC’s Global Governance Advocacy Lead, Valeria Betancourt.
“The power of the paradigm shift at the Global Gateway lies not only in the new role that private-sector actors can play in financing development and impact, it is also in the contribution they can make to building on the long tradition of collaboration and complementarity between concessional and commercial financing through blended finance, adapting it to the current challenges and realities,” Valeria Betancourt adds.
Working so closely with an EU institution on development finance is something new for APC, even though it has some members in the region, such as Pangea in Spain and BlueLink in Bulgaria, who have been engaged in various EU forums and spaces in the past. It is different, for instance, to its usual advocacy pathways through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the Commission on Science and Technology for Development, the UN Human Rights Council, the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) or the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Forum.
But APC is not alone. A number of its members, partners and associates are also members of the D4D Hub, such as 7amleh, Unwanted Witness Uganda, the Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA) and the Internet Society.
Moreover, at the beginning of the year, with funding from the EU Delegation in Colombia channelled through the Global Gateway, APC member Colnodo launched the first community network in the mountainous and rural Cumbal municipality near the Ecuadorian border, home to tens of thousands of Pasto Indigenous peoples. The initiative, in partnership with the country’s Ministry of Information and Communications Technologies, the Inter-American Telecommunication Commission and the Internet Society, connected 70 households, helping an estimated 400 families who previously had no internet access or mobile coverage get online.
As chair of the CSAG, it is exactly this kind of impact that APC hopes to help catalyse.
What is the Global Gateway?
For many civil society organisations, the multiple institutional mechanisms in place in the EU can feel difficult to understand. Even the Global Gateway – whose one task it seems is to simplify engagement with EU funding mechanisms by being, as its name suggests, a “gateway” – admits to some “narrative confusion” after it was created. It attributes this to “[m]ultiple institutions and tools” resulting in “different interpretations” of what the Gateway actually is, and, in an honest public appraisal of its weaknesses, the “slow disbursement” of funds and “limited visibility of results”.
Launched in 2021 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Global Gateway is both a practical mechanism to channel funds and part of the EU’s “economic foreign policy”. In this respect, it operates in much the same way most bilateral donors do. It has five priority areas or pillars: what it calls “digital”, climate and energy, transport, healthcare, and education and research. Its digital priority area focuses on infrastructure, regulatory frameworks and digital skills.
Its work is underpinned by the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on climate change, and it aims to promote what it refers to as “human-centric digital cooperation”. Importantly, although it is a finance “gateway”, this does not mean its funding partners stop investing or making funds available through their normal channels.
Its “investment packages” are sizable amounts, and are earmarked for Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, and EU neighbouring states in the Western Balkans, as well as countries such as Turkey, Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia. By 2027, it hopes to have attracted some €300 billion in financing. About €150 billion has already been invested in Africa, at the moment a priority region. It has supported 264 projects to date – one of them Colnodo’s community-centred access initiative in Cumbal – and 46 of these were launched in 2025, most focusing on climate and energy.
The D4D Hub sits in the Global Gateway strategy in an interesting way, and is essential to the Gateway’s multistakeholder approach. Its focus is digital investment, and the European Commission’s digital unit is present in the hub. APC, in its role as chair of the CSAG, serves as a focal point for coordination between the hub’s members and its secretariat, supporting the secretariat with information and strategic input as it engages what is called “Team Europe” – the EU’s spirited name for its grouping of member states and finance institutions such as the European Investment Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
The hub’s 10 thematic engagement areas reflect key digitalisation challenges, such as artificial intelligence (AI), connectivity, cybersecurity, the green transition, governance, entrepreneurship and innovation, and gender and digital rights. Up until now, most of its work has involved member states, helping them to create flagship digital projects aligned with the Gateway’s goals.
For APC’s Karel Novotný, who presented several skills-building initiatives run by APC members at a recent D4D Hub meeting, the hub is an interesting space that brings together an unusual mix of donors, NGOs and private sector investors. Other presentations were by NGOs showcasing private sector investment projects, as well as pitches by companies such as Orange who presented their social spending activities, mostly on access and training. It is an environment where Novotný says APC is a bit of a “strange animal”, but where he feels this could play into its favour.
“I do think that we are in a good position to contribute as subject experts to some of the thematic activities that the D4D Hub is planning,” APC’s Karel Novotný says, giving the example of technology-facilitated gender-based violence.
“If the space is about forming strategies that might be implemented by donors, then APC can meaningfully contribute to thematic discussions on building the future funding priority landscape”.– APC’s Karel Novotný.
As important for APC is the Civil Society and Local Authorities Advisory Platform. The advisory platform was formed after a call for expressions of interest in 2023, and it reflects cross-sectoral concerns. It has 42 civil society members, alongside four “social partners, professional and business associations”, made up of business, cooperative, employers and trade union bodies, and 11 “associations of local authorities”. There are 10 observers to the platform.
Members include organisations working on digital rights, transparency, food security, education, youth, conservation and environmental rights, disaster reduction, and rural farming and development – Oxfam, the Red Cross and Transparency International are amongst them. The cross-sectoral focus sometimes makes for some strange bedfellows, such as the World Organization of the Scout Movement. Its involvement is likely due to the potential for youth mobilisation – it has over 60 million scouts and volunteers across the world – but it must be the first time APC has engaged the organisation.
The main goal of the platform is to work with the European Commission, providing feedback on its rollout plans, investment priorities and partnerships in different regions in the Global South.
“The right kind of capital”
The Global Gateway’s emphasis on blended digital finance is crucial for APC, whose Local Networks (LocNet) initiative run in partnership with Rhizomatica has for some time argued that this is the way to build sustainable community-centred connectivity. Blended finance is necessary to address what it has identified as an investment gap in the funding of community networks, created in part by the shuttering of USAID by the Trump administration in 2025.
Speaking at the Global Gateway Forum in Brussels in October last year, APC’s Executive Director Chat Garcia Ramilo stressed the need for regulatory frameworks that support the rollout of community networks and that “capital must be relevant” to their needs. Garcia Ramilo felt that the Gateway should diversify its investment ecosystem, designing financing instruments that support smaller, community-driven projects.
“We see hundreds of them – each different, but all proving that connectivity can be meaningful and inclusive,” she said. “What we need now is the right kind of capital.” – Chat Garcia Ramilo
Something of what this “right kind of capital” might look like was suggested by Rey-Moreno in his contribution to a discussion paper called Digital connectivity in the European tech business offer. The “tech business offer” was developed for the Global Gateway as part of the EU’s International Digital Strategy by the European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM). It is an effort to support the expansion of European businesses interests outside of the EU, but in a way that responds to developing country priorities. The initiative has five focus axes – subsea cables, satellite connectivity, 5G and fibre, and data centres – and has a dedicated web page with briefing notes on topics such as digital sovereignty, industrial connectivity, and diplomacy, finance and cooperation. The ECDPM initiative also has an economic foreign policy frame, and in line with the Global Gateway it stresses the human-centric approach to its digital diplomacy and investment opportunities.
The 68-page discussion paper draws on interviews with institutions, EU member states, partners, banks, companies and civil society. It is a serious evaluation of the strengths and failings of the EU’s external digital agenda, and the positioning of its industrial sectors. It highlights APC’s work with community-centred connectivity initiatives, emphasising the importance of innovative financing models to support community connectivity across the Global South.
In an interview that contributed to the paper, Rey-Moreno suggested that there were few funding mechanisms for last-mile connectivity, and that this affected community networks which were typically smaller than the minimum project sizes required by direct foreign investment. Effectively they were falling through the funding and investment net, and the Global Gateway was an opportunity to address this critical gap. For Colnodo, it is precisely this gap that funding from the Gateway has started to address.
“The Global Gateway is a highly important funding mechanism for organisations working in the Global South because it channels resources directly into locally led solutions that neither the market nor traditional state programmes reach. – Julián Casasbuenas G., Colnodo’s director
He says that besides setting up community networks in remote regions, Global Gateway funding has allowed Colnodo to train some 300 people, mostly women and youth, and support productive rural initiatives through a competitive subgranting fund.
The funding has also strengthened policy dialogue: the project has contributed to an enabling regulatory environment, including establishing different regulatory conditions for community internet services and community access to the 900 MHz band. “For civil society organisations in the Global South like Colnodo, sustaining and expanding this kind of direct, flexible support is essential to closing the digital divide in rural and historically excluded territories,” he says.
Colnodo’s impact on the ground is a good example of the value that APC can unlock for financing institutions, says Betancourt, which also means accessing funding through local stakeholders: “APC networks have a wide reach and can be extremely useful in identifying the areas, sectors and stakeholders for funding, while also establishing close relationships with local stakeholders, including those within the ecosystem of local financial institutions,” she says.
“Our networks often have a deep presence across territories and a more granular understanding of the most appropriate solutions for specific contexts. Based on its track record and extensive experience in linking policy with practice and the global with the local through its network approach, solid strategic alliances and partnerships, APC is well placed to contribute in this regard.”
But what is “human-centric” digital cooperation?
Recently the D4D Hub commissioned a guide called A Team Europe guide to human-centric digital cooperation under Global Gateway. The guide – which APC contributed to through detailed input and review – offers a very useful overview of existing instruments, guidelines and policies developed by stakeholder groups across the world that are relevant to human-centric digital cooperation. There must be about 60 identified in total, indicating how much thinking has gone into fair digital development across sectors and institutions. It also offers an ecosystem analysis of best practices that demonstrate the human-centric approach, applying this to subsea cable cooperation, connectivity in central Asia, Earth observation, AI, and e-government and public interest technology.
The guide feels like an exploration of clusters of ideas of what might be meant by a human-centric strategy – or one that puts people at the centre of development. It emphasises that “[t]he human-centric offer has a human rights-based approach (HRBA) at its core,” and offers an interesting account of the diplomatic tensions in policy language between the use of the terms “human-centric” (the EU’s preference) and “people-centred”, which it associates in particular with China. It shows that the terms are not necessarily evenly applied in UN documents, and also refers to a push by African stakeholders for the term “digital Ubuntu” to be used. Ubuntu means “I am because you are” – which emphasises both the individual as well as the collective.
Given that the tensions between individual and collective rights are often debated by digital rights groups in the Global South, this account can be read as the start of a provocative conversation. For instance, an argument made by APC’s Women’s Rights Programme is that digital security from a feminist perspective can only properly be understood as collective. APC itself refers to “people-centred” internet governance in its most recent strategic plan, and has long used the term as its advocacy focus. However, at times it also talks of “human-centric” governance, as in the gender analysis of global cyber norms it developed with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which is highlighted in the guide.
The guide, however, argues that the “dichotomy can be misleading” and points to the human rights framework and EU law, which emphasise both individual civil and political rights and economic and social rights, which also apply to collectives. This recognition is carried over into the language used for international cooperation by the D4D Hub, which refers to a “digital future driven by people's needs”, stressing fundamental rights and intersectional challenges.
The guide also flags the work that Colnodo has done through support from the EU Delegation in scaling up access in remote regions, and it gives good space to LocNet’s work – both its research on financing mechanisms for locally owned internet infrastructure, and its Principles for community-centred connectivity initiatives. The Principles, the guide says, “reflect the human-centric elements discussed in this report – from inclusion, human rights and gender, to environmental and operational sustainability to capacity-building and local ownership.”
Building a space for influence
The Global Gateway is not a perfectly oiled machine. Some have criticised a lack of transparency in its operations, such as getting up-to-date data on spending. For APC, the links between the D4D Hub and the Civil Society and Local Authorities Platform, which tend to operate in silos, also need to be strengthened.
The public communications of the Global Gateway can nevertheless be disarmingly honest, whether talking about its visibility and institutional coherence to the outside world, weaknesses in its delivery, or what it admits as its “[struggle] to sell its vision of digital connectivity to partner countries.” Its agenda is also forthright; it is unequivocal that the strategy is part of the EU’s economic foreign policy, or “digital diplomacy”, and that it wants to promote the region’s declared values: human dignity, freedom, equality, democracy, rule of law and human rights.
The D4D Hub’s guide to what human-centric digital cooperation might mean is not directive, but informative and exploratory. It does not shy away from problematising the use of the term “human-centric”, even though it argues in favour of the principle. It is focused on digital investment not just for the sake of investment, but in a way that helps marginalised and disadvantaged people and groups across developing countries. And civil society is not powerless in shaping what this might mean.
Critically, the D4D Hub’s mandate ended in June, and phase two of the strategy still needs to be confirmed. For APC, it is important that this happens. While there remains work to be done to strengthen the multistakeholder mechanisms that have been set up, they offer a unique opportunity to collectively influence how powerful EU institutions and businesses channel their funds to Global South organisations working on what matters close to the ground.