The Africa-EU Strategic Partnership is the formal channel through which the European Union and the African continent work together. It is based on the Joint Africa-Europe Strategy that was adopted by Heads of State and Government at the second EU-Africa Summit in 2007.

Time is running out. At current emissions levels, the IPCC tells us that a safe 1.5°C “carbon budget” will be exhausted in 7 years. Africa is uniquely vulnerable to climate disruptions. For each additional degree of global temperature rise above the present level, one billion people will find themselves living in areas uninhabitable for humans, cattle and crops, as those areas will be as hot as the hottest parts of the Sahara Desert. Many of those places are located in Africa.

The energy sector in Africa still faces huge challenges that include low generation capacity and efficiency, high costs, unstable and unreliable energy supplies and low access rates, amongst others. These challenges have adversely affected socio-economic development on the continent. With the demand for modern energy consistently on the rise, there critical need to address policy, investment, markets and technical barriers to energy sector development on the continent.

The Lagos Plan of Action (officially the Lagos Plan of Action for the Economic Development of Africa) was an Organisation of African Unity-backed plan to increase Africa's self-sufficiency. The plan blamed Africa's economic crisis on the Structural Adjustment Programs of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and the vulnerability of African economies to worldwide economic shocks, such as the 1973 oil crisis. It has been characterized as the collective response of African states t

Climate change is causing unprecedented variations in the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events: floods, droughts and heatwaves. How African countries prepare for and manage these extreme events would be fundamental to the performance of their economies and realisation of their development aspirations as embodied in various national development plans, the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the African Union’s Agenda 2063.

PIDA is a continent-wide program to develop a vision, policies, strategies and a programme for the development of priority regional and continental infrastructure in transport, energy, trans-boundary water and ICT.  The Program’s Sector Studies, which are to be supported by the requested IPPF Grant, will prepare detailed analysis of strategic options for the development of the continental infrastructure in Transport, Energy, ICT and Trans-boundary Water based on a common vision to emanate from consultative/validation workshops at sector, regional and continental levels.

The EU has launched a Technical Assistance Facility (TAF), to assist partner countries in fine tuning their energy policies and regulatory frameworks to allow for increased investments in the energy sector. It supports countries which are committed to reaching the Sustainable Energy for All (SE4ALL) objectives, in particular those who selected energy not only as one of the priority areas of their national policy agenda, but also chose energy as a focal sector in their bilateral cooperation with the EU for the period; 2014-2020.