ABSTRACT
The overarching political framework for relations between Africa and the European Union (EU) is the Joint Africa-EU Strategy (JAES), formally adopted at the Lisbon Summit in 2007 by representatives of 53 African and 27 European states. This chapter examines the evolution of Africa-EU relations as shaped by the development and implementation of the JAES. It analyses the diverse range of sectoral objectives, financial instruments and multiple overlapping geographical strategies the agreement incorporates, from the background to the 2007 Lisbon Summit through to subsequent high-level Africa-EU summits in Tripoli in 2010 and in Brussels in 2014 and the AU-EU Summit in Abidjan in 2017. Overall, the notions of equality and shared ownership so central to the JAES at its inception have remained more of a vision than a reality, with much of the continental relationship still heavily reliant on EU-donated money.
