The European Commission has committed €10 million of EU money to a scheme aimed at creating 500,000 jobs for women in the Middle East and North Africa, as unemployment across the bloc has risen over the past year.
Mediterranean Commissioner Dubravka Šuica unveiled the Surging Women’s Employment Initiative on September 24 at an event co-hosted with UN Women in New York. It was held on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
The project is due to mobilise €25 million in total by 2030, of which €10 million is the EU’s contribution. The Commission’s announcement did not say where the remaining €15 million would come from.
Set against the headline target, the full budget amounts to €50 for each job the initiative hopes to create. The EU’s own share works out at €20 per job.
Šuica said the scheme would turn the target into programmes for skills, entrepreneurship and work opportunities. It also seeks to raise women’s employment in the region by 5 per cent by the end of the decade.
According to the EU executive, the money would pay for training and support for female entrepreneurs, as well as reforms to make it easier for companies to hire women. The care economy, the green economy, science and technology were singled out as priority sectors.
The announcement came as the EU’s own labour market softened. According to the bloc’s statistics office Eurostat, 13.5 million people were unemployed across the European Union in July, 296,000 more than a year earlier.
The EU jobless rate stood at 6.1 per cent, up from 6 per cent in July 2025. The rate for women was 6.3 per cent, above the 5.9 per cent recorded for men.
Some 2.9 million people under 25 were out of work, a youth unemployment rate of 15.1 per cent. In Spain the figure was 22.9 per cent and in Sweden 24.4 per cent.
Finland and Spain had the highest overall jobless rates among member states, at 10.5 per cent and 10 per cent respectively. Spain also recorded the highest unemployment rate for women in the bloc, at 11.2 per cent, followed by Greece at 10.4 per cent.
Brussels justified the new spending by pointing to a gender gap in the Middle East and North Africa labour market. It said female participation there had hovered at around 20 per cent on average for more than two decades.
A 2024 World Bank working paper, cited by UN Women in a policy brief in May this year, estimated that closing gender employment gaps could raise gross domestic product (GDP) per capita by 50 to 79 per cent in some countries in the region.
The scheme the EU is now backing carries a UN Women name that predates Brussels’s involvement. The agency’s regional director for the Arab States, Moez Doraid, presented the Surging Women’s Employment Initiative in Doha in November 2025.
He said at the time that at least 45,000 new jobs for women were expected across the Arab region in 2026, according to a report carried by Zawya. On July 2, UN Women and cleaning products company Diversey launched a hospitality strand of the same initiative in Dubai, aimed at 9,050 women by 2030.
The Commission said more than 900 companies in the region had signed up to the Women’s Empowerment Principles, a framework drawn up by UN Women and the UN Global Compact.
The EU has already funded work in the same field through its aid and development budget. This includes a €2.5 million project with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on women’s access to finance in eight southern Mediterranean economies.
That programme, due to run from 2024 to 2027, covers Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, the Palestinian Authority and Tunisia.
The new initiative falls under the Pact for the Mediterranean, which the Commission presented on October 16, 2025 and which was formally launched in Barcelona on November 28 that year. Šuica’s portfolio was created for Ursula von der Leyen’s second Commission with a brief covering investment, job creation and migration among other areas.
Other projects under the pact include an €80 million Social Entrepreneurship Fund for the region. The Commission and Germany’s development ministry committed €15 million and €39 million to it respectively.
The pact’s flagship energy strand, the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy and Clean Tech Cooperation (T-MED), aims to mobilise up to €25 billion in expected investments by 2035, according to the Commission.
Šuica’s schedule in New York also included the signing of the first two early recovery projects for Gaza with UNICEF and the UN Development Programme (UNDP), according to the European External Action Service.
She has previously said proper recovery work in Gaza could not begin without Hamas giving up its weapons.
