EU targets dynamic new relationship with Africa

They are talking about a change of paradigm. Europe will not work "for" Africa – or perhaps, she should have said, Africa "for" Europe – but "with" Africa, a new partnership of equals, and African "ownership" of its own fate. At least that's how ambitious EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini puts it.

A partnership between two continents linked by a history of brutal, exploitative colonial rule, one defined in recent years by a far-from-equal donor-recipient relationship.

A new focus on Africa, Mogherini insists, in which the continent’s hidden real wealth, its dynamic young people and women, are put centre stage. Above all, unblocking private investment.

But when European Commission president Jean Claude Juncker, in his state of the union address in Strasbourg last Wednesday, delivered the new pledge to Africa, it was not what grabbed the headlines.

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Time may be kinder. Perhaps, in the broader sweep of history, if the member states show the political will and come up with the cash in the current budget round (from what Leo Varadkar and Simon Coveney have been saying about Africa, Ireland will be strongly supportive), Juncker's Africa pledge should, and will, be seen as the real headline.

The commission is proposing a new “Africa-Europe Alliance for Sustainable Investment and Jobs” involving a massive 25 per cent hike in the EU Africa budget for 2021-27 to some €40 billion. It will combine direct aid to projects like education in a huge African “Erasmus” programme and investment and loans leveraging private investment through seed capital and loan guarantees that multiply that value many times over.

Free-trade zone

In the medium-to-long term, the aim is to lay the basis of an Africa-Europe free-trade zone stretching from northern Finland to Cape Town. In the short term, to rationalise and reduce the 52 separate trade barriers in individual African states’ trade deals with the union to encourage both trade with the union and intra-African trade.

The short-term ambition, the commission says, is for the alliance to generate up to 10 million jobs in the next five years, ensure 35,000 students and academics from Africa benefit from Erasmus+ by 2020 ( and a total of 105,000 in 10 years), to give 750,000 people vocational training, provide access to electricity for up to 30 million people and a boost generation capacity by 5 GW.

Some 3.2 million jobs in Africa are expected to be created under the External Investment Plan just by the investment programmes focused on empowering small- and medium-sized enterprises.

Too good to be true? “We’ve heard it all before,” a jaded journalist told Mogherini on Friday. “Why should we believe it now?” A change of focus and new prioritisation has been promised for some years.

“Ask the Africans,” Mogherini replied. The ambition is 100 per cent shared, she says. The shape and momentum of the initiative have come from the EU-African Union summit in Abidjan last November.

And, just as importantly, the EU’s revived interest in and commitment to Africa has come from a series of very recent pressing political imperatives. Africa is no longer just a humanitarian challenge, although it is still that, and moral cause. The commission argues that “what happens in Africa matters in Europe. And vice versa.” And more so than ever before.

Irresistible logic

There is the irresistible logic that tackling the migration flood into Europe can only be ultimately stemmed by making African countries places that their people don't want to leave. And then there's the concern that by default, others – notably China – will increasingly step into the breach, creating new strategic concerns on Europe's southern flank.

It means building on an already strong relationship. The EU already has a significant head start: EU-Africa trade of €245 billion last year represented 40 per cent of the latter’s trade, compared with 16 per cent in respect of China. Europe is currently responsible for 40 per cent of Africa’s foreign direct investment; the US, seven per cent; China, five per cent.

EU business is already the biggest investor in Africa, holding an investment stock of some €216 billion. And now a “step change” in investment in Africa is promised by the commission.

Just one caveat. This new approach relies heavily on the idea that the future of Africa’s growing economies and emerging middle classes lies in galvanising an entrepreneurial engine that simply needs to be pump-primed and set loose.

It is a faith in the benign nature of capitalism and communities’ ability to tame it to their needs. That is certainly the predominant “common sense”of our time, but it is not necessarily one based on the long view of history.