Part Three: The EU-Africa Policy Analysis.
Sixty-six million years ago, something fell out of the sky. An asteroid, ten to fifteen kilometers wide, struck what is now the coast of Mexico with a force that ended the age of dinosaurs and wiped out roughly three-quarters of all species on Earth. It reset who got to exist without discimination and out of that reset, eventually, came us.
I am not a scientist, and I offer this as a metaphor, not a prediction. But I keep returning to one question while writing this series: is climate change the next reset? Climate change is not a single dramatic reset but rather a slow-motion reset and it does not care who built empires and who did not. It simply rearranges who keeps standing.
This is the third and final part of a three-part series exploring climate change through my eyes from the parched plains of Kenya to the heat-stricken cities of Europe, and now to the policy rooms where the future is being negotiated.
Deals built from imbalance
Europe’s wealth was substantially built through the colonization of Africa. Walter Rodney made this case in his book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa: Europe’s development and Africa’s underdevelopment were not two separate histories, but one process. Europe grew richer at the exact rate Africa was made poorer.
That history is one or two generations removed from where we stand now. So when I watch Europe warming faster than almost any other region on Earth, and then watch that same Europe turn back toward Africa with a new round of climate and energy deals, I find myself asking: is this a genuine partnership, or the same extraction wearing a greener label?
But Rodney’s analysis only explains part of the problem. The rest belongs to the choices African leaders have made since independence and the choices they continue to make today.
The Pigs are still in the Farmhouse
I’ve written before, in a piece called The Pigs Are Still in the Farmhouse, about how Africa’s weak link has never really been its people or resources but its leadership. That piece borrowed from Animal Farm: the animals overthrow their farmer under the promise that four legs good, two legs bad and through the principle of Animalism, seven commandments are formulated. By the end, the ruling pigs break all the commandments and the human that they so badly resented, they become and adopt a human lifestyle. The slogan now changes to four legs good, two legs better. The other animals can no longer tell pig from man.
Africa’s leadership class, too often, behaves like a drove of pigs who started out as liberators and slowly became indistinguishable from the systems they replaced. Deals with Europe are not signed by “Africa” rather, they are signed by African leaders, on Africa’s behalf. If a deal enriches the farmhouse and leaves the rest of the yard exactly where it started, “Africa” made a deal in name only.
This makes me wonder, are we African nations really independent?
Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Kenya’s first vice president published an autobiography titled Not Yet Uhuru: not yet freedom. His argument made years after Kenya’s independence questions whether political independence without economic independence is complete indpendence. An example is: when the terms of a mining concession or an energy partnership are substantially set abroad and merely signed at home, how much independence is actually being exercised?
Power recognizes power
Both things are true at once: Africa has been and continues to be exploited, and African leadership bears real responsibility for how it responds to that exploitation. As long as these deals are framed as charity/aid gratefully received rather than a negotiation between equals the power in the relationship stays exactly where it has always been.
Burkina Faso’s Ibrahim Traoré has become a symbol, for a large segment of African youth, of what sovereignty-first politics can look like. It is worth noting that Traoré is a military leader who came to power through a coup, and Burkina Faso continues to face severe security and humanitarian challenges under his leadership. His popularity is not proof that his methods are right. It is a signal of how hungry the continent is for something that feels like real control over its own resources, after decades of independence that often did not feel independent at all. That hunger is the part worth taking seriously. Whether Traoré or anyone else can translate that hunger into sustainable governance and genuine development is a question that remains unanswered.
EU – Africa climate deals
So what are we actually talking about when we talk about “EU-Africa climate deals”?
The EU’s Global Gateway strategy has earmarked roughly €150 billion for investment across Africa between 2021 and 2027 in the transport, digital infrastructure, climate, energy, health, and education sectors. Its energy-specific arm, the Africa-Europe Green Energy Initiative (AEGEI), aims to add at least 50 GW of new renewable capacity and connect 100 million more Africans to electricity by 2030, backed by pledges exceeding €20 billion. The imbalance this is meant to address is real: Africa holds an estimated 60% of the world’s best solar resources but receives less than 2% of global clean energy investment, while roughly 600 million Africans still lack electricity access at all.
On paper, this looks like opportunity, and it could be. Moving parts of European industry and renewable investment into Africa could create jobs, transfer skills, and build the kind of infrastructure that keeps young people building futures at home instead of risking dangerous migration routes abroad. It could lower emissions for Europe while growing African economies. This is a real, achievable win-win.
Global Gateway is not the only deal of its kind, and the pattern across all of them is instructive. In 2021, South Africa signed a Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) with the EU, Germany, France, the UK, and the US worth $8.5–9.3 billion meant to help the country move away from coal power. It was hailed as a model for the developing world. Four years on, the US has quietly withdrawn its pledge, rollout has lagged behind the original timeline, and independent analysts have described it as caught “between hope and disappointment.”
More striking still are the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Partnerships, signed with the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, Namibia, and Rwanda between 2022 and 2024, securing European access to the cobalt, lithium, copper, and rare earths that Europe’s own clean energy and EV industries depend on. Researchers who reviewed the actual agreement text found that cooperation is defined around minerals classified “as per the EU definition” meaning the priorities driving these partnerships are, contractually, Europe’s, not the host countries’. Three different deals, three different names, one consistent underlying goal: securing what Europe needs for its own transition, while financing just enough African development to make the arrangement politically presentable.
The risk however, sitting underneath that opportunity is the one this whole series has circled from the start. Africa’s economies are still developing, and there is real danger in accepting large-scale deals before the continent has had the chance to grow on its own terms; the same grace period industrialized nations gave themselves, often at the planet’s expense, without conditions attached. Europe should not be allowed to treat African poverty as the selling point for these deals, because that framing gets the story backwards. A continent holding this much mineral, agricultural, and energy wealth was never poor to begin with. It has been underdeveloped, often by design, exactly as Rodney argued more than fifty years ago.
Genuine partnerships
Negotiation, not gratitude, is what changes outcomes. African leaders need to walk into these discussions with their own terms already drafted, not simply accept whatever is offered. A continent that does not negotiate will be left with the smallest share of the value it is creating, and will then absorb the blame for outcomes that were never fully in its own control.
What might those terms look like? Here are a few examples:
- Revenue sharing agreements that ensure a fair percentage of resource wealth stays in the host country, rather than flowing out as profits to foreign shareholders.
- Local content requirements that mandate a certain percentage of jobs, supplies, and services come from the host country’s economy.
- Technology transfer provisions that require foreign partners to share knowledge and build local capacity, rather than simply extracting resources and leaving.
- Value addition clauses that incentivize or require processing and manufacturing to happen within Africa, rather than exporting raw materials to be refined elsewhere.
- Independent monitoring and review mechanisms that give host countries genuine oversight over how projects are implemented and whether promises are kept.
These are not radical demands. They are standard features of partnerships between equals. Their absence from so many EU-Africa deals is itself a statement about who holds the real power.
The people this is supposed to help are rarely the ones who see these billions trickle down to them: the fisherman whose catch has thinned with warming waters, the informal artisan whose workshop has no reliable power, the small-scale trader whose goods spoil faster in the heat, the micro-entrepreneur running a kiosk on credit and hope, the members of a local trade association trying to negotiate for their own sector with no seat at any national table. That has to change, and it starts with African governments insisting that it does, publicly and specifically, deal by deal.
And Europe has its own reframing to do. This was never really donor-and-recipient to begin with, once the history is accounted for. Africa’s land, minerals, sunlight, and labor are the real leverage at this table and empowering African development is squarely in Europe’s own interest too: fewer emissions, a genuine return on investment through cost-effective production, reduced migration pressure, and a stronger trading partner on its doorstep. Two continents negotiating as equals stand to gain far more than a donor-recipient relationship ever could which is also, ultimately, what the UN Sustainable Development Goals mean when they insist that no one should be left behind.
The role you can play
Climate change and the politics wrapped around it can feel overwhelming, especially once you’ve seen how deep the history runs. But action doesn’t have to be grand to be meaningful.
Educate yourself and others. Read beyond the headlines. Follow organizations like the African Climate Policy Centre or the Stockholm Environment Institute to understand climate justice from a global perspective and share stories like this one, because personal narratives carry weight that statistics alone cannot.
Support climate justice organizations doing the work on the ground. Consider supporting or volunteering with groups like the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance, which centers local leadership rather than imposing outside solutions, and prioritize renewable energy initiatives built around community ownership and benefit-sharing.
Rethink your own energy footprint, wherever you live. Be aware about supporting policies and leaders who advocate for a just transition that doesn’t leave the Global South behind.
Amplify African voices in this conversation. Seek out and share the work of African climate writers, activists, and policymakers, since this narrative has too often been shaped by people speaking about Africa rather than from it.
Stay engaged, even when it’s hard. Climate grief is real, and so is the fatigue of watching slow-moving political failures. Feel it, and then channel it through a conversation, a donation, a vote for leadership that treats sovereignty as a responsibility rather than a slogan.
Closing remarks
I did not need a scientific report to tell me the climate was changing. I felt it first as a child watching thinning cattle and silent villages, and I felt it again as an adult sweating through a packed German train in July. What the data has done is confirm, with numbers, what lived experience already knew. The task now is to make sure the people who felt this crisis first are not the last to benefit from the solutions to it.
The people who felt this crisis first across farms, coastlines, markets, and workshops must not be the last to benefit from its solutions. The asteroid that ended the dinosaurs’ world didn’t ask permission and neither did it negotiate. Climate change won’t either. The only real question left is whether, before it forces the reset on us, we manage to build something more honest than the farmhouse we’ve been living in.
Sources
NASA/Lunar and Planetary Institute (Chicxulub impact event, K-Pg extinction); Walter Rodney, “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” (1972, Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications); Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, “Not Yet Uhuru: The Autobiography of Oginga Odinga” (1967, Heinemann, foreword by Kwame Nkrumah); George Orwell, “Animal Farm” (1945); Al Jazeera and CIVICUS Monitor (Burkina Faso political and civic space reporting, 2025–2026); European Commission Climate Action and International Partnerships pages (Global Gateway, AEGEI, Just Energy Transition Partnership with South Africa); Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung (“An Unjust Transition: South Africa’s JETP Between Hope and Disappointment”); AfriPoli, “Navigating Critical Mineral Supply Chains: the EU’s Partnerships with the DRC and Zambia.”
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