On Tuesday 18 September, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) published a stern report on the EU's support for the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA). ECA concluded on the relative ineffectiveness of this assistance due to a lack of clear priorities or long-term vision, and it concluded on the need to refocus the EU's assistance on capacity-building rather than on financing basic operational costs.
Much is at stake as the EU has counted peace and security on the African continent among its priorities since 1996, and peace and security were recognised as a priority in the 2007 Africa-EU joint strategy.
ECA's audit focused on contracts for over €100 million that were concluded by the European Commission between 2014 and 2016 and financed by the European Development Fund, mainly through the support facility for peace for Africa that was created in 2003.
In ECA's view, the EU has financed operational costs without any plan for refocusing the assistance. It has not allocated its assistance according to sufficiently well-defined priorities. The increase in allocations from regional organisations includes risks. Despite the EU's assistance, the APSA has experienced difficulty and its functioning depends on the continuation of external assistance. At the time the audit was carried out, only half the contracts had produced the expected results. The implementation of assistance brought by the EU was delayed and was characterised by the inconsistent use of financing instruments and a lack of information on the results obtained. The late conclusion of contracts and retroactive financing disrupted the implementation of the activities provided for.
To refocus the EU's assistance and encourage the African Union (AU) to take ownership of the APSA, ECA says the European External Action Service and Commission should closely monitor that the AU respects the commitment to achieve its financial independence by 2020, and should jointly determine what the evolution of the EU's assistance to the APSA should be in order to diminish gradually, with a view to eventually eliminating, the assistance serving to finance the basic operational costs for the benefit of more targeted capacity-building programmes. (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)