The tussle over who's monitoring the AU-EU partnership

Both sides agree it’s important to keep track of the commitments made at last month’s summit of African Union and European Union leaders, though there is no deal yet on how that will happen. And as a new foundation, backed by the European Commission, makes a play for a greater role in monitoring the partnership between the two continents, the AU and other European civil society organizations are yet to be convinced. Aware of their failure to mobilize €44 billion ($48.5 billion) in investment by 2020 as promised at the previous AU-EU summit in 2017, European leaders vowed that the follow-up to this year’s event, which advertised at least €150 billion in public and private investment for Africa, would be different. That has led back to what Carlos Lopes, until recently the AU high representative for partnerships with Europe, called “one of the most sensitive issues” between the two continents: how to monitor what they do together. “Most of my mandate … was devoted to promoting the need for an instrument to govern the [AU-EU] partnership,” Lopes, who is now a professor at the Mandela School of Public Governance at the University of Cape Town, wrote to Devex by email this week. “After all there is no partnership that is not based on mutual accountability.” Despite the Abidjan declaration of 2017 calling for annual joint ministerial meetings, Lopes wrote that only two of these were held in the past five years, with the second in Kigali last October serving more as a preparatory meeting for the Brussels summit rather than a review of progress to date. Then, as negotiators exchanged drafts of the final declaration in the lead-up to the Brussels summit on February 17-18, a new fault line emerged over a potential role for the Africa-Europe Foundation — co-founded in 2021 by the Friends of Europe think tank, Mo Ibrahim Foundation, ONE Campaign, and African Climate Foundation. The foundation began with the help of a €4.5 million grant from the European Commission for 2019 to 2022 to support high-level strategy groups, though a foundation spokesperson told Devex by email that it has now secured €2 million funding for its multiannual programming for 2022-2024 from “leading Foundations operating in Africa and internationally, philanthropic organisations and regional development institutions working for the Africa-Europe Partnership.” A draft European Commission document, prepared before the summit and seen by Devex, stated that the foundation could be a means of facilitating “engagement” and “communication,” separate from the formal political meetings between AU and EU officials. However, the AU side, concerned that the idea for the foundation’s inclusion had come too late and worried about creating a structure with the same status as the formal interinstitutional process, struck all references to it from the declaration. In the end, the summit text stated that “Follow-up will be done on a regular basis via existing AU-EU structures.” If that was the outcome on paper though, then Senegalese President Macky Sall, who referred to the foundation at the summit’s closing session, and Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, who followed up at a press conference minutes later, may not have received the memo. Michel told reporters that it was important to put in place a monitoring mechanism starting from the AU and EU commissions and political leaders, but also “with the mobilization of private sector actors and civil society actors, notably the Africa-Europe Foundation, to make sure that there are regular meetings to provide the capacity to see which projects are advancing well, which projects are coming together in line with the planning, [and] which ones need maybe new impetus, adaptation, improvements.” Those comments were welcomed by the foundation in a press release where it seemed to go beyond engagement and communication to foresee a role for itself in monitoring, “[complementing] existing mechanisms to monitor the commitments made at the summits and make sure tangible results drive the partnership forward, in close collaboration with the relevant institutions and other stakeholders.” “The Africa-Europe Foundation is honoured to have been referenced by the AU and EU co-leadership of the Summit and is ready to assume its responsibilities in supporting an effective follow-up and monitoring,” Chrysoula Zacharopoulou, a centrist French member of the European Parliament who also co-chairs the strategy groups of the Africa-Europe Foundation, told Devex by email this week. This would come “in an independent way that is complementary to existing mechanisms at ministerial and AU and EU Commission levels,” she added. Zacharopoulou, who was also the rapporteur on the European Parliament’s new Africa-EU strategy, also set out the foundation’s planned activities, including ensuring that “the scope of its monitoring work post-AU-EU Summit focuses not only on the Africa-Europe Investment Package but also more broadly on the different political commitments, from enhanced cooperation on migration and mobility, to the focus on youth economic inclusion.” However, the AU are not the only ones with reservations about the foundation’s burgeoning role. “The Africa-Europe Foundation work is valuable and relevant,” Ricardo Roba, senior policy and advocacy adviser at CONCORD, a confederation of NGOs working on development issues, told Devex by email. “However, the Foundation does not represent African and European CSOs. They don’t have a mandate to represent us, we did not choose their members and we don’t participate (at least not everyone) in their work.” The issue of how to monitor the AU-EU partnership is expected to feature in a meeting of the AU and EU commissions in Brussels in the spring. A European Commission spokesperson told Devex that both the AU and EU will prioritize the need to establish a follow-up mechanism to ensure their words translate into actions, and “we will work together to find the best way forward.”