Policy Paper

As the United States retreats from traditional official development assistance (ODA), and China consolidates its infrastructure-led alternative, the European Union is recasting development cooperation as investment-led geopolitical statecraft under the Global Gateway initiative, with digital transformation serving as the central sector of this paradigm. Drawing on stakeholder interviews and fieldwork across the Indo-Pacific region and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as a novel three-tier classification of OECD Creditor Reporting System (CRS) digital ODA flows for 2019–2024, this report maps where European digital development finance actually goes and identifies viable pathways for EU–Asia donor cooperation.

It discovers that the already existing asymmetric EU footprint across the regions (dominant in Africa, but thin in the Pacific and secondary in Southeast Asia) is shaping the sustainability of its digital development projects, with this sector increasingly intersecting with all others. As economic cooperation gradually replaces economic development goals, member state development agencies are still more operationally present in recipient countries and regions than EU institutions. The national development agencies’ digital development disbursements predominantly focus on digital inclusion, while EU digital ODA concentrates on the governance level.

The multistack nature of digital technologies requires joint projects that involve multiple development agencies, both in Europe and in Asia, given their technological advancements. However, donor coordination mechanisms remain underdeveloped in the Team Europe Approach, and the roadmap for EU–Asia donor partnership is even less clearly charted. Among them, Taiwan’s upstream digital capabilities remain structurally opaque to European partners. The report concludes that the most realistic cooperation routes for the Taiwan International Cooperation and Development Fund (TaiwanICDF) run through acting as a donor coordinator platform in regional programs, especially where the EU and European development agencies are phasing out, proactively engaging with smaller member state agencies, and utilizing institutional channels such as multilateral development bank trust funds, subcontracting, and European Investment Bank (EIB) procurement, rather than branded bilateral partnerships. The report offers differentiated recommendations to European and Asian stakeholders and decision-makers in the international development sector.

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