Marjeta Jager

Marjeta Jager is a European civil servant of Slovenian nationality who has served as a Deputy Director-General of the Directorate-General for International Partnerships (DG INTPA) of the European Commission since January 2021, responsible for coordinating its Directorates D, E and F. She had held the equivalent post in the directorate-general's predecessor, DG DEVCO, since January 2016. Within the Commission she worked for a decade on transport and energy before moving to development policy.

Education Jager studied at the Faculty of Law of the University of Ljubljana from October 1986 to June 1991, taking a bachelor's degree in law together with the bar examination in international law.

She was seconded in November 2014 to establish the cabinet of the incoming Commissioner for Transport, Violeta Bulc, serving as her head of cabinet until May 2015 before returning to DG MOVE as Director responsible for transport security, inter-institutional relations, communication, economic analysis and impact assessment, legal matters and infringements, and policy coordination.

In May 2020 Jager met the Deputy Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization, Beth Bechdol, together with other DG DEVCO officials, to discuss the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on food and agriculture. Both sides emphasised the 'humanitarian-development-peace nexus' and the need to engage the private sector in transforming global food systems, particularly in Africa, which was contending simultaneously with the pandemic and a desert locust infestation.

International partnerships (2021–present) When DG DEVCO was reorganised and renamed International Partnerships, Jager was made responsible from 16 January 2021 for coordinating Directorates D, E and F. She described blending as a flexible instrument that channels additional finance to sectors important to partner countries' priorities, gives investors access to markets they would otherwise avoid and can be used to raise investment volumes, subsidise interest rates, provide risk capital and guarantees and improve the investment climate. She reported that since operations began in 2007, EU grants exceeding €8 billion had leveraged around €70 billion in loans from financial institutions and regional development banks, generating total investment of more than €115 billion, and cited the Huruma Fund, the first project managed by COFIDES under the EU blending facility, as an example of underwriting private-sector risk to reach farmers and small producer organisations.

In an interview with the International Network of Basin Organizations (INBO) published in December 2024, Jager described water as a key driver underpinning all the Sustainable Development Goals, noting that the EU had disbursed €2.6 billion in the 2014-2020 programming period and committed a further €1.4 billion between 2021 and 2023, with the EU making over €1.1 billion available for transboundary water cooperation across eighteen major basins in Africa and Central Asia.

She argued that European experience is instructive because transboundary river basins cover 60 per cent of the continent's territory, forcing cooperation and that managing shared resources cooperatively builds peace and prosperity, citing the Danube and its nineteen riparian countries. The Water Framework Directive of 2000, she said, gave water managers across Europe a common reference covering the whole water cycle, while its river basin districts, which cut across administrative boundaries, created new democratic spaces for states to discuss shared water bodies. Promoting water democracy, in her account, means involving a wide range of stakeholders so that solutions are transparent, accountable and locally owned.

Explaining the choice of INBO and the French water agency OiEau to lead a peer-to-peer learning project for basin organisations, Jager pointed to INBO's network and to the EU's record with OiEau in implementing the Water Initiative Plus in the Eastern Partnership countries. She favoured a problem-driven approach yielding best-fit rather than generic best-practice solutions and cited exchanges between Brazilian and French basin agencies on drought and flood prevention, as well as support from the Loire-Bretagne agency for watershed planning in the Bandama basin in Côte d'Ivoire.

Languages

Jager's mother tongue is Slovene; she also works in English, French, Croatian and German.