Milan, Italy, June 20, 2025 (Lusa) - The European Commission and the Italian government, co-organisers of the summit on cooperation with Africa held today in Rome, affirmed their commitment to mobilising “transformative investments along strategic economic corridors, with a focus on the Lobito Corridor”.
“Collective efforts, including the signing of a memorandum of understanding by Angola, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the European Union (EU), the United States, Italy and the African Development Bank and the African Finance Corporation, ensure that the Corridor is positioned as a high-impact driver of sustainable development,” read a joint statement released at the end of the summit by the European Commission, led by Ursula von der Leyen, and the office of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
After Von der Leyen pointed to the Lobito Corridor as the “best practical example” of the advantages that can result from strengthening cooperation and partnership between Europe and Africa in her speech at the summit, this 1,300-kilometre railway project linking Angola and Zambia via the DRC creating a regional logistics centre for the transport of minerals and agricultural products, the joint declaration issued in Brussels and Rome and the leaders’ final statements to the press both highlighted this initiative.
“The Lobito Corridor has a transformative regional role. In addition to being a railway development project, it is also a broader economic corridor that will link the natural resource-rich and landlocked regions of Southern Africa to global markets, including Europe,” reads the joint statement.
The leaders attending the Rome summit “reaffirmed their intention to accelerate investment in interconnected sectors, including transport infrastructure, energy systems, agricultural value chains and trade facilitation”.
Welcoming what they call “the growing alignment between the Global Gateway and the Mattei Plan” - the strategies for cooperation with Africa that the EU and Italy promote, respectively - Von der Leyen and Meloni stressed the importance of “enhanced coordination with international financial institutions”.
On the other hand, “the leaders recognised the key role of the private sector in delivering the next phase of the Lobito Corridor, underlining the importance of scalable, climate-aligned and commercially viable investments”.
At the final press conference, the organizers limited the session to statements, and Meloni, Von der Leyen and the President of the African Union Commission, Ali Youssouf, attended—the Angolan President, João Lourenço, had announced his participation but delegated his representation at the summit to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Téte António, the Italian prime minister stressed that the success of the Lobito Corridor initiative, “an ambitious and certainly complex challenge”, depends on political will and “the ability to involve the private sector”.
“The challenge for us is for Africa to grow and prosper from its wealth,” said Meloni, who promoted the Mattei Plan to limit immigration from Africa by helping the continent’s economy, and who hopes that this investment strategy will help combat “the causes that lead so many young people to pay criminal organisations to undertake dangerous journeys in search of a better life, which societies [in Europe] can seldom provide”.
In his speech, the president of the African Union Commission said that the member countries of this organisation “truly appreciate this constructive and results-oriented relationship”, considering that the Mattei Plan and the Global Gateway initiative, a 150 billion euro investment package launched in 2022 by the EU, “represent a new level of commitment, and their alignment with the African Union’s agenda is of the utmost importance.”
“The promotion of trade corridors, such as the Lobito Corridor, will enable our member countries to boost intra-African trade,” he said, adding that the EU’s Global Gateway strategy has identified 11 other corridors that could be developed.
“This will certainly change the way of life of our populations and lift millions of people out of poverty,” he stressed.
Expressing the hope that the world will keep focusing on these critically important partnerships and the objectives set despite the strong geopolitical tensions, Ali Youssof reiterated that this is the way forward: “We are proud to be able to say here today, from Rome, that we are now on the right path towards a truly fair and equitable partnership between Africa and Europe.”
The total value of the commitments shared between the EU and Italy towards the African continent announced at today’s summit, during which the participants signed several sectoral agreements, amounted to 1.2 billion euros.
The joint declaration issued by Rome and Brussels announces that “the leaders agreed to review the progress of the strategic partnership within the framework of the EU’s Global Gateway strategy and the Mattei Plan for Africa at the Global Gateway Forum on 9 and 10 October 2025 in Brussels.
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