Can the European Union be a genuine partner for Africa? Not a donor. Not a rulebook. A partner.
The honest answer, for now, is: not quite. But the honest answer also contains the possibility of something better.
Africa is not waiting for Europe to make up its mind.
China has dispensed with conditionality and arrived with cash and concrete. Russia has traded mercenaries for influence and media platforms for narratives.
The Gulf states, Turkey and India are all deepening ties with a continent that will be home to a quarter of humanity within a generation.
Meanwhile, the European Union — Africa’s largest export market, its biggest aid donor, its most significant investor — too often finds itself explaining, in Brussels jargon, why its projects are behind schedule.
The liberal case for a transformed EU-Africa relationship is not complicated. It rests on a straightforward insight: neither continent can achieve its ambitions alone. Europe needs secure and diversified access to critical raw materials, Africa’s renewable energy potential as well as its young and dynamic workforce. Africa needs investment, technology, and access to markets that do not come attached to political debts.
What has been missing so far is the honesty to say so plainly, and the institutional ambition to act on it.
Where to begin?
First, we should set up an EU-Africa Industrialisation Pact — a commitment to break, at last, with the extractive logic that has shaped so much of the relationship.
For too long, Africa has exported raw materials and imported manufactured goods, a pattern that traps countries in the lower rungs of global value chains and leaves European supply chains dangerously exposed.
The pact would redirect investment toward processing and manufacturing on the continent itself. It is not charity. It is supply-chain realism.
Second, we should make EU aid simpler. A single European implementing agency for development assistance would be a good place to start.
The current patchwork of national frameworks makes the Europeans’ collective generosity look, to partner countries, like a bureaucratic puzzle. Harmonisation is in order.
The suspension of USAID by the Trump administration has created a void that no single European actor can fill alone. Together, with the visibility and coherence that a unified instrument can provide, the EU could step into that vacuum not merely as a replacement donor but as a structural anchor for global development finance. The moment demands it.
Third, the EU and Africa must have a more balanced security and defence cooperation.
That means African-lead peace operation backed up by predictable financing. There is no growth where there is conflict. Europeans should also cooperate better with African countries by sharing information on terrorism and lead joint investigation on organised crime, the way they do among each other within Europol. That would show trust and would be mutually beneficial.
Europeans should also secure a permanent African representation in the UN Security Council.
What about values?
Make no mistake, partnerships are transactional in nature, but they need not be devoid of principles. The liberal answer is not to abandon standards. It is to pursue them through partnership rather than prescription.
On the economic front, that means procurement and guarantee procedures adapted to local markets, so that African SMEs can actually access European investment. It also means a functioning EU Talent Pool that connects African job-seekers to European employers through legal, structured pathways, addressing Europe’s demographic shortfall and Africa’s employment challenge simultaneously.
On the societal front, it means taking the information environment seriously.
Russia and China are not only competing for contracts; they are competing for narratives.
EU-Africa media partnerships, designed to strengthen independent journalism and expose disinformation campaigns, should not just be a soft addendum to the hard politics of trade and security. They are, increasingly, part of the same struggle.
Principled partnership should also mean self-criticism on the EU’s part.
Global Gateway, the EU’s flagship infrastructure initiative, has the right ambition but insufficient delivery. Its projects are too slow, its communication too weak, and — embarrassingly — some of its contracts have gone to the very Chinese companies it was designed to offer an alternative to. That must change.
Finally, to become a genuine partner, Europeans must change attitude. That is where party politics comes in.
If one listens to the European Left, Africa is a place to must help and apologise to.
If one listens to the Right, Africa is a problem to be managed and a source of migration on our doorstep.
We, European liberals, believe that Africa is an opportunity and a future to be built among equal partners.