Background
APRI - Africa Policy Research Institute marks its fifth anniversary this year with the launch of a new institutional strategy. This hybrid panel discussion is the public element of the anniversary programme. APRI's work covers industrial policy, critical minerals, and the political economy of Africa’s relationships with the European Union, China and other partners. When the Institute was established in Berlin in 2021, its remit was to bring African analysis into German and European policymaking and to provide policy options to African governments. That remit has since widened, in step with the changes this discussion examines.
The Event
Development cooperation is being restructured, and largely at the initiative of the donor countries themselves. Aid budgets across Europe are contracting under domestic fiscal and political pressure. The vocabulary of the relationship has shifted to mutual interest, partnership and investment. Strategic endowments have become the principal currency of exchange, traded against packages of technology transfer, capital and offtake commitments that are frequently slower and smaller in delivery than in announcement.
A successor arrangement is taking shape. What remains unsettled is who sets its terms. African governments today hold a wider set of counterparties than they did five years ago, spanning China, the Gulf states, Türkiye, India, the European Union and the United States, and in principle a greater capacity to choose among them. Whether this has produced greater leverage or greater fragmentation is a matter of genuine disagreement, and it is that disagreement the panel is convened to examine.
Philanthropy occupies the same contested space. It is increasingly asked to sustain work that public budgets no longer support, while its own priorities are shaped by the same geopolitical pressures. This includes the question of how independent African policy capacity is financed, which bears directly on institutions such as APRI.
