Red carpet for Meloni at African Union summit — but wars and financing threaten to overwhelm welcome

By Benjamin Fox, The EUobserver, 11 February 2026

NAIROBI - Italian premier Giorgia Meloni hopes on Friday (13 February) to cement her status as one of the bridges between Europe and Africa, when African leaders roll out the red carpet for her in Addis Ababa.

Meloni will host an Italy-Africa summit on the margins of the African Union’s annual summit in the Ethiopian capital.

She is then set to give the opening address to start the summit.

Meloni launched her ‘Mattei Plan’ for Africa — named after Enrico Mattei, the former chairman of Italian oil and gas giant ENI — back in 2024. It follows the broader agenda of the EU Commission in offering investment in infrastructure projects, in exchange for commitments that African governments will take a tighter grip on migration flows to Europe.

Melon’s blueprint consists of projects in Algeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Morocco, Mozambique and Tunisia, focusing on education and training, agriculture, health, energy and water and with a total funding envelope of around €5.5bn.

Its investment model is similar to the EU’s own Global Gateway, which has promised to mobilise more than €100bn in financing for projects, primarily transport and energy, across the African continent.

The Italian PM says that the investments will address the root causes of migration, but she has also offered debt swaps as part of a promise to halve the debts of low-middle income African nations.

At a Mattei plan summit last June, co-hosted with EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen she offered to convert $270.67m [€236m] of debt into development projects. Failure on debt reform risked “undermining all other efforts” to boost African economies, said Meloni.

Coast-to-coast African rail plan

But the biggest item of Italian spending is the €320m committed to the Lobito Corridor project to rehabilitate a colonial era rail network connecting Zambia’s copperbelt region, south-east DR Congo and Angola’s Lobito port on the Atlantic Coast.

The $5bn project , which involves an additional €2bn from the EU and $2bn from the US, will upgrade 1,300km of railway, creating an alternative to Chinese-controlled export routes.

The first cargo shipments of minerals via the Lobito Corridor are expected in late 2026, say Italian government officials.

Aside from Meloni’s presence in Addis, the AU has a close financial relationship with the EU.

In 2024, the EU contributed $370m towards the AU’s $605m annual budget and the AU’s Commission, the administrative arm of the organisation, is modelled on the EU executive but has a fraction of the resources and institutional memory.

In addition to its budget support, the EU Commission also provides technical backing to the AUC as it seeks to draw up harmonised regulation to govern the African Continental Free Trade Area and a proposed African Medicines Agency that would be closely modelled on the EU counterpart.

Existential crisis for AU?

But the AU is facing its own existential crisis. There are growing concerns that Ethiopia, which hosts the AU’s headquarters, is on the brink of war with its neighbour Eritrea. That would be the latest in a series of deadly conflicts across the continent.

‘The AU’s problems are inherently political,’ said Mahboub Maalim, a former executive secretary of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, the regional group for the Horn of Africa.

These include a lack of political commitment and a refusal among the 55 member countries to finance the AU’s budget, leaving the organisation reliant on foreign donors.

The AU’s own headquarters in Addis were built by China — which is now building new offices to house the Economic Community of West African States, a regional bloc.

Critics of the AU say that it is little more than a talking shop for the continent’s leaders, that specialises in pumping out a plethora of policy resolutions that are then forgotten about when leaders return home.

At a briefing in Nairobi earlier this week, Mehari Taddele Maru, the chair of the Pan African Agenda Institute, a think-tank, warned that the EU and other international players now had little interest in promoting traditional development agendas in Africa.

Instead, “the focus is on power, identity and resources,” he said, adding that the EU and the United States were both currently “inward looking”, and preoccupied with their own problems —primarily defence and migration.

Article 4 of the AU charter states that it will intervene if a government loses control of its territory as part an AU peace and security architecture was drafted to ensure ‘African solutions to African conflicts’ .

Yet the organisation has either been silent or had a marginal role in attempts to mediate ceasefires in Sudan and eastern DR Congo. That has left the US, the Gulf States and Turkey to emerge as the main peace mediators in the east and north African conflicts.

And the Mattei plan is not the only European game in town.

France plans its own Africa summit that will be hosted by Kenya later this year, and is also expected to focus on infrastructure investment projects funded by the private sector.