The European Commission inequality marker: Guidelines for the application and scoring of interventions

We are thrilled to announce that the guidelines of the Inequality Marker, an innovative tool to better understand, track and benchmark DG INTPA’s impact across all sectors on inequalities, have been successfully translated into French, German, Italian and Spanish! This latest development will enable a broader audience to understand how to apply the Inequality Marker (I-Marker) and its criteria.

Launched on 23 June 2023, by Commissioner Urpilainen, the I-Marker was developed in the framework of the EU-AFD Research Facility on Inequalities to contribute to the global and shared efforts in addressing inequalities. The I-Marker is a fundamental tool for the European Commission to achieve its overarching objective of "addressing inequalities by building inclusive and sustainable societies", by assessing whether, and to what extent, inequality reduction is an objective of our interventions. 

By both focusing on the bottom poorest 40 per cent and on the most socio-economically disadvantaged, the I-Marker enables the assessment of the contribution of development cooperation interventions towards achieving SDG10. Development interventions can be scored against the I-Marker on the following three levels:

• I-0: Inequality is not targeted
• I-1: Inequality reduction is a significant objective
• I-2: Inequality reduction is the principal objective

It is worth noting that the application of the I-Marker goes beyond SDG10 as it tends to serve as complementary to different tools, such as the OECD-DAC gender marker and disability marker, capturing the multiple dimensions and drivers of inequality and intersections between socio-economic disadvantaged groups and other vulnerable groups. 

By providing a common framework to assess the inequality-reducing effects of development interventions, its guidelines and new translations into French, German, Italian and Spanish aim to encourage efforts towards reducing inequalities. 

The French, German, Italian and Spanish translations of the Inequality Marker guidelines can be found at the link below (click on “Download and languages” to see the different available languages): 

https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/2faa22b4-a8fb-11ed-b508-01aa75ed71a1/language-en/format-PDF/source-280515442