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The European Union's Africa strategy

In 2005 the EU announced a "quantum leap” in relations with Africa in its Africa Strategy. Its goal is to become the central political actor and partner for the political and economic development of Africa. The implementation of the strategy is still at its beginning.

The EU's development cooperation with Africa still overwhelmingly takes place in the form of a treaty-based cooperation which began fifty years ago with the ACP group of states, formed out of the former European colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific.[1]

Der Präsident der Afrikanischen Union Alpha Oumar Konaré mit dem Präsidenten der Europäischen Kommission Jose Manuel Barroso.
Foto: AP

It has been financed by the European Development Fund (EDF) and administered as a special budget according to its own rules. The same goes for the new agreement, signed for a twenty-year period on 23rd June 2000 in Cotonou, the capital of Benin, after detailed evaluations and consultations. This treaty obliges the ACP states to respect for human rights and democracy, the rule of law, the fight against poverty and participation by the people. In return, the EU has offered an increase in aid, a more flexible process of consultation, a simplified process for making grants, but above all direct payments into state budgets. Over and above the payments made according to the terms of the Cotonou Agreement, the African states also receive grants from world-wide programmes financed out of the EU's budget, such as food aid, humanitarian aid, the programme for strengthening human rights and democracy, as well as finance for the development work of non-governmental organisations.

However, the political conditions which were laid down for the first time in the Cotonou Agreement have been only partly effective, because the amount of EU aid and dependence on it have not been significant enough to bring the key actors to heel in serious conflicts over political power or privilege. In spite of improvements in the way aid is used, and in spite of the increase of direct payments into state budgets to 35% of the total aid, the implementation of the treaty in its first five-year cycle turned out to be difficult. The treaty also corresponded only partially to the new consensus on development policy, expressed in the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations, the conclusions of the G8 summits Kananaskis 2002, Evian 2003, Gleneagles 2005 and Heiligendamm 2007, the UN Conference on Financing for Development at Monterrey in 2002 and the Paris Conference on the Aid Effectiveness in 2005.

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