In Brussels on Friday, 10 October, the European Commission finalised a series of strategic agreements to strengthen the development of the Lobito Corridor, a major transport route connecting Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and Zambia.
In the context of the Global Gateway Forum (see EUROPE 13727/27), the EU institution announced that a sum of €50 million was going towards supporting the development of agricultural value chains in Angola and that it had, with the Netherlands, launched the ‘From Transport to Trade: Lobito Corridor Catalyst’ project (€8 million) in order to make a logistics platform in Caála operational.
The European Commission also signed a €10 million partnership with the ‘GoCongo Foundation’ to strengthen agricultural value chains in the DRC, granted €6 million to facilitate regional trade, and finalised a €9.8 million contribution with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) for vocational training in the Zambian mining sector.
A €36 million ‘Team Europe’ grant was announced in support of “inclusive and sustainable” agricultural chains in Zambia.
Finally, the European Commission also announced that, by 2028, it was aiming to triple European Investment Bank (EIB) loans for sustainable cocoa in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Cameroon.
New budgetary guarantees. Three new agreements for budgetary guarantees have also been signed with the Association of European Development Finance Institutions (EDFI) – coming to a total of €742 million under the European Fund for Sustainable Development Plus (EFSD+), one of Global Gateway’s financial instruments (see EUROPE 13716/17).
These guarantees will support the creation of local value chains (€194 million), the energy transition through renewable energy projects (€332 million), and the establishment of a secondary financial market to facilitate investment flows (€216 million), thus bringing the EDFI’s total guarantee capacity to €1.6 billion. (Original version in French by Bernard Denuit)