26
NOV
2025
Overall, the economic influence of the countries of Europe on the African continent has decreased significantly in recent years and decades. Admittedly, the former colonial powers are still ahead of the stock of foreign investment in Africa, as their once exclusive colonial influence still has an effect today. Great Britain, for example, can refer to a stock of investments in Africa of 58 billion US dollars, France to an investment stock of 53 billion US dollars. Between them is the USA (56 billion US dollars), behind them Germany far behind them (14 billion US dollars).[ 1] China has caught up rapidly in the past two and a half decades, has an investment portfolio of 42 billion US dollars and was able to increase its investments by net 3.37 billion US dollars last year, while the United States had to accept a net minus of 2.02 billion US dollars.[ 2] With the decrease in African exports, the average share of the EU fell from 47.8 percent in the 1990s to 26.8 percent from 2014 to 2023, while Asia's share increased from 4.5 percent to 26 percent. In Africa's imports, Asia is long ahead of the EU with 21 percent with a share of 32.9 percent. 3]
In order to strengthen its own business share on the African continent again, BusinessEurope, a Brussels-based lobby association in which 42 business associations from 36 countries are united, proposes a focus on the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement. January 2021 applied. It is intended to reduce intra-African trade hurdles in order to increase continental trade. This also requires an expansion of the infrastructure, which previously ran mainly from the raw material areas to ports and served the interests of the old colonial powers. However, the potential for trade expansion is immense; experts point out that continental trade in Africa was only 16 percent of total foreign trade before the launch of AfCFTA, while it reached 59 percent in Asia and even 68 percent in Europe. 4] It is possible to increase the free trade of the African states among themselves, then immense profits would be beckoned on the huge market with over 1.4 billion people, according to BusinessEurope.[ 5] In this regard, it is advisable for the EU to actively support the - still sluggish - implementation of the AfCFTA.
Specifically, at the summit ending today in Luanda, the EU had an eye on the states of Africa – and in particular the so-called Lobito corridor. This is a traffic corridor that runs from the rich resource areas in the south of the Democratic Republic of Congo and northwestern Zambia to Angola and ends at Lobito on the Atlantic coast of Angola. The port city of Lobito was built around the middle of the 19th century. It was founded in the 19th century by the Portuguese colonialists; it was later the end point of a railway connection that helped transport raw materials from the south of the Congo and then shipped them. These were mainly copper and later uranium from the province of Haut-Katanga in the Congo, the latter being mostly delivered to the United States. 6] The USA used the uranium from the Shinkolobwe mine in Haut-Katanga to build their first atomic bombs. Other uranium reserves from the Congo stored in Belgium were confiscated in 1940 by the German occupiers, who used them for their ultimately unsuccessful efforts to build nuclear weapons.
The new interest in the Lobito corridor is due to efforts by the United States and the EU to shake China's strong position in the African raw material sector. In the south of the DR Congo and in the northwest of Zambia, they are not only interested in the copper, but above all in cobalt deposits. According to reports, a good two-thirds of the cobalt traded worldwide come from the Congo, where Chinese companies are very active in the extraction of raw materials. In addition, around 75 percent of global cobalt processing is carried out in China. The repair of the railway connection to Lobito should make it possible to bring copper, cobalt and other raw materials to the west and to have them processed in Western countries. The USA and the EU agreed at the G7 summit in New Delhi in September 2023 to promote the project as part of the G7 initiative Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII). The EU also wants to support it as part of its Global Gateway Infrastructure Initiative.[ 7] China, for its part, has announced that it wants to repair the old railway connection from Zambia to the coast of Tanzania - also for the transport of raw materials.[ 8] The construction of the Tanzania-Zambia Railway (Tazara) was one of the largest development projects of the People's Republic from the late 1960s.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz is trying to improve the EU's chances on the African continent by distancing itself from the United States. Merz could not only be quoted with the laudatory statement that Africa is "a continent of opportunities", whose "potential ... is quite obvious"; the EU as a whole is still Africa's largest trading partner, and "we want to remain so". 9] Already on Sunday, following the G20 summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, he had expressly referred to the boycott of the meeting by the United States. The US administration had canceled its participation in the summit and had already torpedoed its preparation in order to harm South Africa. This was not possible; the summit could be completed relatively successfully. It was "not a good decision by the American government" to "miss here," Merz explained: "But the American government itself must know that. It was good for us to be here.” 10]
Whether the attempt to profile Germany on the African continent against the USA is certainly uncertain. The Federal Republic is also involved in an extremely harmful measure by the Western states for Africa – the dramatic reduction in development aid – although not quite as excessively as the USA, which has crushed almost all its support for the developing countries. The Trump administration's cuts alone could plunge 5.7 million citizens of African states into extreme poverty by next year, according to a study by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) from South Africa. 11] The Africa Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Addis Ababa, in turn, predicts that the reduction in Western development aid as a whole could lead to two to four million Africans dying annually due to diseases and hunger. 12]
[1] Linda Calabrese: Who holds the biggest foreign investments in Africa? Not China. odi.org 07/10/25.
[2] Deborah Brautigam: Has the US Overtaken China in African Investment? chinaafricarealstory.com 17.11.2025. In 2023, US investments in Africa had significantly exceeded those from China for the first time in more than a decade. However, this was apparently a one-off effect.
[3] BusinessEurope outlook on EU-Africa relations. Brussels, September 2025.
[4] Nelly Nyagah: A five-year review of the AfCFTA through a trade union lens. tradeunionsinafcfta.org 04.07.2025.
[5] BusinessEurope outlook on EU-Africa relations. Brussels, September 2025.
[6] Colette Braeckman: Angola-DRC. The 'Lobito corridor' at the heart of rivalries between China and the West.
[7] Elie Dumas, Alexandra Gerasimcikova: The Lobito Corridor: Europe's neocolonial vision for plundering Africa. counter-balance.org
[8] Jevans Nyabiage: China to bring Tanzania-Zambia railway back to full speed with US$1 billion boost. scmp.com 03.10.2024.
[9] Europe and Africa want to deepen partnership. zdfheute.de 24.11.2025.
[10] Thomas Spickhofen: Satisfied - even without the USA. tagesschau.de 11/23/2025.
[11] Jakkie Cilliers: Data modelling reveals the heavy toll of USAID cuts on Africa. issafrica.org 28.02.2025.
[12] Kerry Cullinan: Africa CDC: Aid Cuts Will Result in Millions More African Deaths. healthpolicy-watch.news 20.03.2025.