This op-ed by Nadejda Dermendjieva and Dobromira Terpesheva from the Bulgarian Fund for Women was first published in EUobserver.
The EU is like a family. One large, complicated family, full of fragile alliances and long-term feuds. Over the next two years, during negotiations for the new multi-year budget, known as the MFF, every member of this family will have their own demands.
For women’s organisations and funds, however, these high-stakes talks will unlikely feel like a family picnic.
We will have to push for a seat at the table and struggle to be heard when we ask for adequate funding for gender equality from the EU’s vast coffers.
Will the EU’s next seven-year budget finally put its money where its values are?
Pocket change for gender equality
Budgets are not a sexy topic. They are often wrapped in inaccessible language and political trade-offs.
But behind every budget line lies a story about what matters and who counts.
When the European Commission put forward its proposal, it introduced a new programme, AgoraEU, which would merge three programmes – Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV), MEDIA and Creative Europe – into a single funding stream backed by €8.6bn.
It’s unclear whether the new programme will survive the negotiations.
The CERV strand, which aims to protect and promote human rights, gender equality and democracy, still amounts to pocket change compared to the total EU budget.
Just €3.59bn would be allocated against nearly €2 trillion overall, representing barely 0.18 percent of the entire proposed budget.
Huge challenges remain in Europe. Women across Europe still earn on average 13 percent less than men, are more likely to live in poverty after retirement, and remain underrepresented in decision-making.
Still today, one in three women experiences physical and sexual violence in their lifetime, and millions lack access to accessible reproductive healthcare.
According to the commission’s own recent assessments, up to 92 percent of essential initiatives addressing some of these challenges went unfunded in recent years due to the limited budget.
Within CERV, the two strands focused on promoting gender equality and fighting gender-based violence consistently receive the smallest budget allocations while attracting the highest number of applications and leading to the lowest success rates for civil society.
In Bulgaria and other central and eastern European countries, the issue is not only scarce funding but also how it will be redistributed.
When EU money flows through patriarchal, corrupt or retrograde governments eager to roll back women’s and LGBTQ+ rights, it tends to evaporate into thin air before it ever reaches grassroots civil society. It is still unclear how the commission will ensure the transparent and fair distribution of funds without political interference.
Main image: The Bulgarian Fund for Women.