The European Development Days 2018 took place in Tours & Taxis, Brussels on the 5^th and 6^th of June. It featured prominent speakers such as Jean-Claude Juncker, Antonio Tajani, Frederica Mogherini, Cecilia Malmström,  Queen Mathilde of Belgium, Queen Letizia of Spain, Paul Kagame the president of Rwanda, Marie-Louise Coleriro Preca the president of Malta, and Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka the Executive Director of UN Women.

This year’s event focused on topics of sustainable development with a special emphasis on gender- the rights and opportunities for women and girls.  The hashtags #SheisWe and #SheDDs marked the event and trended on Twitter.

The president of Malta, Marie-Louise Coleriro Preca spoke in the opening ceremony of the fact that in recent decades the gender gap has actually increased. Gender parity has shifted into reverse since measurements begun by the World Economic Forum. She urged that action needs to be taken to change this trend.

In the panel on Empowering Women in Sustainable Investment and Business through the EIP, Rebecca Holmes said that as women are more socially and economically vulnerable then social protection policies targeting women should take into consideration local causes, such as social protection labour division, etc.

Betsy Nelson mentioned that women are the most loyal customers of banks. However, often do not go into entrepreneurship, and when they do then they have smaller businesses. Also, women have trouble receiving loans, as their applications are evaluated more harshly.

The EIP (EU External Investment Plan) has stepped in to help in these cases to provide funding for women entrepreneurs.

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“Social Economy- How to scale up?”

The European Economic and Social Committee held a conference on the 4^th of June in Brussels on the topic of how social enterprises can scale up. Successful social enterprises shared their experiences on the road to success. The aim of the event was to propagate the social enterprise model and at the same time create a space for discussions on how to create an impact, have gender equality, and to scale up.

Nicholas Schmit (Ministry of Labour, Employment, Social and Solidarity Economy, Luxembourg). In Luxembourg they had adopted social economy and now see it is vital to be adopted on a larger scale too encourage entrepreneurs to adopt social economy standards. The hope is that social economy is adopted on the level of large enterprises. Start-ups already adopt the social economy approach and Schmit hopes this gains ground and becomes more popular around Europe. Time to be concrete and to develop social economy strategy on the European scale. Also, in Africa, Balkans, etc. The international community has a role to play in helping social enterprises scale up.

Christophe Itier (High Commissioner for Social Economy and Solidarity Economy and Social Innovation, FR) sees that political and economic influencers/decision makers have wrong or different ideas about social economy scaling up (increasing the visibility is often undervalued). They don’t think it is economically viable and it is just a means for social help, but this is simply not true. Therefore, it is necessary to make social enterprises more visible and show that it can be sustainable and economically profitable.

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The 2018 edition of the Innovation Sessions took place on the 4th of June. It was aimed at bringing together various stakeholders from both public and private sector to discuss and debate on the topic of Healthcare Systems and Future Therapies.

The Keynote speech was by Carlos Moedas (the Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation) who spoke about the future directions of Horizon Europe.

Horizon Europe will be about merging the physical and the digital worlds. One of these is the Health field. Links between citizens and health- digitization of health.

Last 100 yrs were about killing the disease. He thinks the next 50 yrs would be about managing the patient life quality- personalised medicine.

Moedas believes (in reference to GDPR and the Facebook scandal) that we should personally own our data, especially our medical data, and do what we want with it- donate it for research or monetize it if we want to.

Carlos Moedas also thinks that in 5 years we will go to a doctor who utilizes an AI. If they do not use an AI then we would change the doctor. But we would not have the AI as the doctor, we still need the doctor with the human perspective.

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