When Partnership Is a Performance: Why Africa Must Reclaim the AU–EU Migration Agenda
Twenty-five Years On, Still Negotiating the Basics
The year 2025 marked a significant milestone of twenty-five years of the African Union–European Union (AU-EU) Partnership, the formal political framework between the African Union and the European Union. Since the first summit in 2000, held in Cairo, this partnership has sought to define the unique cross-continental relationship, producing an elaborate architecture of summits, joint strategies, action plans, and declarations, all framed around shared values and mutual interests. Longevity, however, is not the same as balance. If anything, the AU–EU Partnership has delivered a paradox. The language of cooperation has grown more refined, but the space for genuinely equal agenda setting has remained stubbornly narrow.
This paradox was more evident at the 7th AU–EU summit held in Luanda in November 2025, a meeting that was meant to symbolise both renewal and maturity in the relationship. The summit followed earlier milestones such as Lisbon in 2007, where the Joint AU–EU Strategy was adopted, and Brussels in 2022, where leaders endorsed a Joint Vision for 2030 covering peace, prosperity, climate action and migration. Yet despite this institutional continuity, the dynamics on the ground remain familiar. Long before African delegations arrived in Luanda, the agenda had already taken shape, framed by the one-sided interests of the EU revealed in the Joint Communique of the 3rd AU-EU Ministerial, which was laid out in May 2025. Once again, the priorities reflected European concerns more clearly than African realities.
After twenty-five years of partnership, the problem is no longer whether Africa and Europe talk enough, but who decides what the conversation is about
Migration featured prominently, as it has in almost every AU–EU engagement since the Valletta summit of 2015, when migration became firmly embedded in the partnership as a central political issue. But the way migration appeared in Luanda followed a well-worn pattern. The emphasis rested on managing irregular movement, strengthening border controls, combating smuggling and enhancing returns. These are not marginal issues, but their dominance narrows the frame and misplaces the migration narrative, which offers a promise for development, if collectively managed well, with a migrant-centred, rights-based approach. When migration enters the partnership primarily as a risk to be mitigated, rather than a structural reality to be governed, other dimensions of mobility struggle to gain visibility.
This framing matters because it quietly determines what counts as legitimate policy discussion. If irregularity is treated as the organising principle, then debates about labour mobility, skills portability, urbanisation, demographic change and intra-African movement become secondary. Even less so, will the debate circle on the benefits of financial and non-financial contributions of migrants, remittances, skills circulation, and the significant contributions of diaspora to sustainable development in countries of origin and transit. Africa’s own migration priorities, including those articulated in the Migration Policy Framework for Africa and linked to Agenda 2063, are present on paper but rarely shape the centre of gravity in summit conversations. Agenda setting, in this sense, becomes a form of power, and in the AU–EU Partnership, that power has been exercised unevenly.
In the AU–EU Partnership, migration is not the point of disagreement. Agenda setting is.
The imbalance is reinforced by preparation and structure. The European Union arrives at AU–EU summits as a bloc, with coordinated positions and carefully aligned messaging. This cohesion is the product of institutional investment and political discipline. The African Union, by contrast, represents fifty-five Member States with diverse political economies, capacities and national interests. Without sustained coordination ahead of summits, fragmentation is inevitable. Positions are often national rather than continental, and negotiations unfold reactively rather than strategically. Africa finds itself responding to a script it did not write.
Africa often arrives at the table with responsibility, but without authority
This asymmetry is not simply procedural. It is strategic. Who arrives prepared shapes what is negotiated. After twenty-five years, the summit record itself tells a story. Only seven AU–EU summits have taken place since 2000, despite the partnership being described as strategic and comprehensive. These summits are intended to be moments of high-level political alignment, yet they are infrequent and tightly choreographed. Much of the substantive cooperation occurs through funding instruments and technical dialogues where the balance of influence is clearer and often more skewed. A month before the summit, there was little information on the agenda available publicly, which hampered non-state actors from engaging more prominently in this silver anniversary milestone. However, civil society and followers gathered in webinars and self-mobilised events, with a limited number granted access to the Luanda-held civil society youth event organised by the African Union and the European Union. For a summit of this high-level, much more engagement on various thematic lines was expected - granted the parallel AU-EU Business Forum (AEBF2025), complementary to the EU Global Gateway Africa-Europe Investment Package, was more informative and open to engaging a diversity of actors.
When Migration Becomes the Wrong Entry Point
Migration is where the gap between narrative and reality becomes most visible. European political discourse continues to treat African mobility as a looming crisis, yet empirical evidence consistently challenges this view. Most African migration takes place within the continent, driven by work, education, family networks and increasingly by climate stress and urban expansion. Movement within regions such as West Africa, East Africa and Southern Africa far exceeds migration to Europe. Even where Africans do migrate to Europe, the majority do so through regular channels and for economic reasons.
Despite this, deterrence remains the dominant policy reflex. EU-funded return programmes have repatriated large numbers of migrants over the years, but evaluations frequently highlight shortcomings in reintegration support. Returnees are often faced with inadequate support systems, weak monitoring mechanisms, limited economic opportunities for improved livelihoods and minimal follow-up to their reintegration, raising questions about sustainability. The focus on containment may respond to domestic political pressures in Europe, but it rarely engages with the structural drivers of mobility that both continents acknowledge privately. Migration experts and civil society point to the reality of failure of assisted and voluntary return programmes that push a (narrow) narrative based on a narrow impact linked to reintegration.
Regularisation is a good alternative to returns - budget savings and dialogue entry point
What is often overlooked in these discussions is that Africa has not been silent on migration governance. The AU has articulated a coherent vision that frames migration as a driver of development, regional integration and resilience. In fact, the AU Free Movement Protocol (FMP) is twin objective of the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA). Labour mobility, diaspora engagement and free movement are not abstract ideals but policy objectives embedded in continental frameworks derived from Africa’s opportunities in regional dynamics and evident in cross-border movements. Yet in AU–EU spaces, these priorities and realities struggle to displace the security-centred framing that dominates European policy documents and summit agendas.
Official communiqués from AU–EU summits continue to speak the language of equality and shared responsibility. The Joint Vision for 2030 reaffirmed commitments to peace, prosperity and multilateralism. Investment initiatives such as the Global Gateway were presented as transformative. But partnership is not measured by ambition alone. It is measured by whose priorities shape decisions and whose realities are treated as negotiable. When development cooperation becomes closely linked to migration management, particularly border control, it risks reinforcing dependency rather than mutuality.
The partnership speaks the language of equality, but still operates on uneven ground.
This is not an argument against cooperation. Africa and Europe are deeply interdependent. Europe faces demographic decline, labour shortages and the challenge of sustaining its economic model. Africa is home to the world’s youngest population, rapidly urbanising and seeking opportunity. Well-governed mobility could benefit both regions. Yet these complementarities rarely anchor the political conversation. Instead of negotiating how mobility can work, the partnership repeatedly returns to how movement can be limited.
From Attendance to Agenda Setting
If Africa is serious about changing this dynamic, reclaiming the agenda within the AU–EU Partnership is essential. This begins with preparation. Continental positions cannot be improvised at summits. They require advance coordination, credible data and political discipline. Africa has the evidence it needs. What is often missing is the institutional resolve to deploy it consistently and collectively. The African Union needs a strong backbone and solid backing from its member states to negotiate as a bloc.
It also requires a reframing of migration itself. Mobility must be asserted as a governance and development issue, not primarily a security concern. This opens space for discussions about legal pathways, skills exchange, urban planning and regional labour markets. It aligns with Africa’s own policy frameworks and with Europe’s long term interests, even if it challenges short term political narratives.
Equally important is participation. Civil society, trade unions, researchers, diaspora groups and migrants themselves should not be confined to parallel events while decisions are made elsewhere. A partnership that claims equality must be able to incorporate lived experience and independent expertise without fear of losing control. Europe, too, has choices to make. A partnership that remains structurally skewed will ultimately undermine its own objectives. Policies designed without genuine African ownership tend to produce instability rather than cooperation. If the AU–EU Partnership is to mature, Europe must be willing to share agenda-setting power, not only implementation responsibility.
After twenty-five years, the AU–EU Partnership should be capable of greater honesty. Africa and Europe do need each other. But interdependence without agency is not partnership. Africa must move from reaction to strategy, from attendance to agenda setting within the very framework that claims shared ownership.
A relationship can endure for decades and still avoid its hardest truths
If the AU and the EU could go into therapy as a couple, migration would likely not be what brings them into the room. It would be something quieter and more familiar. A sense of imbalance that has been present for a long time. A feeling, on one side, of needing to stay in control, and on the other, of rarely feeling fully heard. Questions that surface indirectly, through tone rather than words. Who speaks first. Who sets the pace. Who adjusts, and who expects adjustment. Until that tension is acknowledged for what it is, the partnership will continue to perform equality without fully practising it. And like any long-standing relationship that avoids naming its deepest discomforts, it may endure institutionally, but it will struggle to mature politically.
Authors:
Margaret Monyani, Ph.D is the Founder and Executive Director of Olam Africa Research Institute. Her interests are on gender, migration and security
Paddy Siyanga Knudsen is lead co-organiser for the African Non-State Actors Platform on Migration and Development.