Eduardo González
Yesterday, the Council of Ministers authorized a voluntary contribution of 2,999,570 US dollars (2,808,150 euros, at the current exchange rate) to the African Union (AU), corresponding to the year 2024.
The African Union was created in 2000 as the successor to the Organization of the African Union (OAU), founded in 1963. Spain is an observer state of the African Union, with which it signed a Memorandum of Understanding on May 18, 2022. According to the Government, the objectives of the AU (defending the unity, solidarity, sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of African countries, the promotion of peace, security and stability on the continent, the defense of democracy and human rights, the promotion of sustainable development and the integration of African economies) “correspond with Spain’s priorities for Africa and fit into the general framework of Spanish foreign policy.”
Between 2009 and 2022, the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) disbursed up to 29 million euros to the African Union. In addition, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, announced in mid-February 2023, during his participation in the ministerial meeting of the Executive Council of the African Union (AU) in Addis Ababa, that Spain will contribute 70 million euros to the development agenda designed by this organization for the year 2063.
Agenda 2063, the AU’s strategic concept for Africa’s socio-economic transformation in 2063, was adopted on January 31, 2015 during the 24th Ordinary Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the Union. The seventy million announced by Albares include an investment of twenty million euros and another 50 million euros allocated by Spain to the African Union Commission to promote sustainable development and global solidarity.
That day Albares was the second Spanish Foreign Minister to give a speech before the Executive Council, after the intervention of Miguel Ángel Moratinos in January 2008, and the first to do so in Spanish, a language currently studied by more than two million people on the African continent and which has become the official and working language of this organization at the proposal of Equatorial Guinea.
Within the framework of this Albares commitment, the Council of Ministers authorized last July (a few days before the early general elections) a voluntary contribution of two million euros to the AU, which was followed by another of five million in September (when the Government was still in office).
