The Lobito Hall, a 1,300km stretch of railway from Kapiri Mposhi on the sting of Zambia’s copper belt to the port of Lobito in Angola, was first laid down within the early 1900s by colonial powers to move crucial minerals from central Africa to its Atlantic ports.
Beforehand referred to as the Benguela Railway, the undertaking is ready to hold 1mn tonnes of copper a yr by 2030 and is being revived because the flagship funding within the EU’s new technique for foreign aid: muscling up and in search of geopolitical beneficial properties for its money.
The EU and its member states are investing €2bn within the undertaking alongside the US, the African Growth Financial institution and personal corporations, in what Brussels’ worldwide partnerships commissioner Jozef Síkela has held up as a brand new mannequin for the bloc’s growth programme.
“That is agriculture, that is logistics, that is vocational coaching alongside transport,” Síkela informed the Monetary Occasions, arguing that the EU introduced a extra sustainable method than China’s huge Belt and Street scheme.
“It connects, in fact, the African copper belt to international commerce and Europe’s clear tech trade, so I cannot cover that we’re getting copper. However as soon as they’ll have the ability to course of [and] refine the copper, then they’ll use the infrastructure for delivery merchandise with increased worth added.”
However non-governmental organisations and a few officers in growth businesses concern that Lobito is emblematic of a contemporary gambit for affect and sources that has uncomfortable echoes of colonial-era Europe’s method to the continent. They’re involved that the EU is sacrificing its values in a race for pure wealth with China, the US and different international powers.
“The Lobito hall is an excellent instance of the problematic nature of the place the EU growth price range and coverage [are] headed,” mentioned Frank Vanaerschot, director of Counter Stability, a coalition of growth and environmental NGOs. “It’s not likely clear how this can favour financial alternatives and pursuits for the native growth.”
Lobito underlines a notable shift within the EU’s perspective to growth help, coming at a time when funding for international help initiatives has been radically cut by the US but additionally as different western governments tighten their purse strings.
The US has indicated it may make investments as a lot as $5bn within the Lobito undertaking, underlining its strategic significance for western international locations as they take a extra transactional method to growth help.
The bloc has put its €300bn International Gateway scheme — introduced in 2021 to supply grants, loans and ensures for initiatives around the globe — to work in favour of its financial and overseas coverage objectives: securing crucial minerals and vitality provides, and curbing irregular migration.
“The event paradigm is altering,” mentioned Dora Meredith, Europe director on the overseas coverage think-tank ODI. “There are extra transactional narratives round and ethical narratives have much less traction with policymakers.”
An ODI report on the EU’s growth agenda famous that in a time of stretched public budgets, arguments for growth could be more practical in the event that they could possibly be “linked to home priorities in a tangible means”.
The EU is by far the biggest donor within the OECD, accounting for 61 per cent of abroad growth help in 2024, in response to OECD figures, though increasingly more of that cash has stayed inside Europe because the bloc channels funding in direction of Ukraine to assist it by means of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Whereas the EU price range for growth and overseas help will obtain a big enhance, doubling from about €108bn to €200bn within the bloc’s subsequent joint price range beginning 2028, it is going to be skilled on extra strategic targets in addition to offering funding alternatives for European corporations overseas.
The initiatives that the EU is championing by means of International Gateway embrace web connections in central Asia utilizing European expertise and a hub for inexperienced hydrogen in Namibia, with extra investments to coach native employees.
The concept, EU officers say, is to supply a extra holistic method than China’s $1tn Belt and Street infrastructure scheme, which has left a number of creating international locations loaded with unsustainable ranges of debt.
“Whereas on the floor International Gateway could also be perceived as primarily an funding push selling the non-public sector, it now comes with a extra complete method, which is essential and really welcome, to broaden its growth affect,” mentioned a UN official.
Alexander De Croo, the brand new head of the UN Growth Programme, informed the FT that there was a logic to the EU’s change of method. “Capital allocation in what you’ll name the developed world is definitely fairly onerous today as a result of the demographics should not very conducive for increased returns as a result of we’re societies with an older demographic.”
That made creating international locations “very engaging as a result of the wants are there. You can begin from a clean web page and the demographics are literally very engaging as a result of that is typically a really younger inhabitants,” mentioned De Croo, a former Belgian prime minister.
International Gateway had “crystallised” an evolution of growth help over the previous few years, he added. “The worldwide dialogue today is dominated by discussions about safety, about migration, about unlawful drug commerce” — “signs” of points equivalent to excessive poverty and inequality that growth help must be used to deal with.
Some UN officers and NGOs, nonetheless, fear that specializing in large-scale funding initiatives, and making funds conditional on points equivalent to curbing migration, may come on the expense of humanitarian help and native growth initiatives equivalent to colleges or hospitals.
“You want each. You want to have humanitarian help. You want to have funding,” mentioned Raouf Mazou, assistant excessive commissioner for operations on the UN’s refugee company. “Border management is professional . . . however when you do this with out investing or offering humanitarian help you’ll waste your sources.”
“This could actually be the precedence: tackling inequality, ending poverty, to guarantee that there’s native added financial worth, that it places native communities on the coronary heart of decision-making processes,” Counter Stability’s director Vanaerschot mentioned.
“Should you then have a look at the truth that a few of the initiatives on the coronary heart of the technique are mining initiatives and large vitality initiatives, that makes it very delicate to issues taking place,” he mentioned, pointing to human rights abuses and environmental dangers related to these sectors.
Within the case of the Lobito hall, officers and NGOs have warned that the undertaking would profit European international locations however ran the chance of making little added worth for native communities.
“There has at all times been self-interest, however now it’s simply extra uncooked, frank and sharp,” mentioned a senior official working in growth. “International Gateway was at all times imagined to be complementary to [official development assistance]. Our concern is that it’ll grow to be an export credit score company to advertise the non-public sector.”
However Síkela insisted that regardless of the European curiosity, International Gateway “must be balanced and it must be to a mutual profit”.
“I don’t consider in zero sum video games,” he mentioned.
