This story by Adesewa Olofinko originally appeared on Global Voices on January 15, 2026.
African and European leaders met in Luanda in November 2025 for the 7th African Union-European Union (AU-EU) Summit, aiming to bolster a partnership that has been pressured by shifting geopolitics and rising global competition. The summit marked 25 years since the AU-EU relationship took formal shape.
Unlike earlier summits, leaders on both sides of the Mediterranean were confronting a world that had undergone dramatic changes since their last Joint Vision in early 2022. At the time, the war in Ukraine and the wave of coups across the Sahel had not yet fully reshaped global priorities. By 2025, Europe appeared increasingly preoccupied by security challenges closer to home, while Africa continued to grapple with violent conflict in some of its regions.
For many Africans, however, the question is no longer simply why these summits keep happening, but how the commitments announced at such gatherings translate into everyday realities, particularly for a rapidly growing youth population.
Africa today sits at the center of overlapping bilateral and trilateral partnerships. Since the early 2010s, the continent has become the site of a renewed geopolitical contest. The first Africa-EU Summit took place in Cairo in April 2000, followed by the Lisbon Summit in 2007. Subsequent AU-EU summits reflected shifting global realities, including joint climate commitments in 2010, the launch of the EU-Africa Roadmap in 2014, and the recognition of the UN 2030 Agenda, the Paris Agreement, and Africa’s Agenda 2063 in 2017.
Other “Africa + 1” summits, including the China-Africa, Russia-Africa, Turkey-Africa, and UAE-Africa summits, signal an intensifying scramble for markets, resources, and influence on the continent. In a video posted on YouTube, Comfort Ero, President and CEO of the International Crisis Group, described Africa as having “a weak center of gravity, lacking the governance architecture it needs.”
In practice, this has produced a fragmented engagement landscape in which external powers negotiate influence country by country, and African states form alliances in response to domestic and geopolitical pressures.
This fluidity has generated uneven outcomes for global actors. France, for instance, has seen its influence collapse across much of the Sahel following the pivot of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger toward Russia after successive military coups.
Similar patterns are visible among other powers. China’s long-established presence across Africa now competes more openly with middle powers and Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which are also deploying financial power in countries like Djibouti and Sudan at a scale typically associated with traditional global superpowers.
As one of the most active external actors in East Africa, the UAE has ongoing projects valued at approximately USD 59.4 billion, making it the fourth largest source of capital flows into Africa, after the European Union, China, and the United States. Analysts have, however, linked aspects of Emirati involvement to conflicts in Libya and Sudan, where such external engagement, as noted in Space Journal analysis, risks prolonging regional instability.
India’s economic footprint has also expanded along a different trajectory. Trade between India and Africa has averaged 18 percent annually since 2003, reaching approximately USD 103 billion in 2023, positioning India among Africa’s largest trading partners alongside the European Union and China.
The United States, meanwhile, has pursued more selective bilateral engagement, particularly around critical minerals. This includes a USD 553 million loan to a transport corridor linking the Democratic Republic of Congo’s copper belt to Angola’s Lobito port.
Africa holds 60 percent of the world’s solar potential and about 30 percent of global mineral reserves. It is also the world’s youngest continent, with 70 percent of its population under the age of 30.
According to the United Nations World Population Prospects, Africa’s population is projected to nearly double between 2020 and 2050, rising from approximately 1.3 billion to 2.5 billion. It will then increase by more than half over the second half of the century, reaching approximately 3.9 billion by 2100. By the end of the century, Africa is projected to have nearly as many people as all of Asia and roughly as many as the entire world in 1975. More than one in three people on Earth in 2100 will be African.
This crowded courtship of the world with Africa extends beyond its minerals and markets into the information spaces. Chinese and Russian state-backed outlets such as CGTN, Xinhua, Russia Today, and Sputnik now compete for African audiences alongside Western broadcasters like the BBC and CNN, as well as Qatar-backed Al Jazeera, Iran’s Hausa TV, Germany’s Deutsche Welle, and Turkey’s multilingual TRT Afrika.
The struggle for influence in Africa, it would seem, is as much about narratives as it is about power.
Amid the rhetoric of shared futures at the 2025 AU-EU summit, a persistent gap remained. While the African Union designated 2025 as the Year of Reparations, European engagement throughout the year largely remained confined to acknowledgements rather than commitments. Africa’s call for historical justice, it would seem, lacked the institutional clarity and political seriousness required to compel meaningful engagement, even as its European counterpart continued to approach questions of historical responsibility with caution and deferral.
This asymmetry was also reflected in the politics of participation at the summit itself.
Speaking to Global Voices on the sidelines of the summit, Alma Jokinen, Finland’s Youth Envoy to the European Union, reflected on who was actually at the table.
As far as I know, I am the only youth delegate within any national delegation, the only official youth representative here. Even some of those reporting from the youth summit are not young people… I do wish that in the future there would be many more present.
The moment reflected a broader pattern in AU-EU relations, where ambitious language about inclusion and intergenerational partnership continues to sit uneasily alongside institutional practices that sideline the very people expected to inherit the outcomes of these agreements.
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