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.”