It is important to make it clear in the first place that EBCAM – European Business Council for Africa and the Mediterranean, as its name shows, is an organization founded by European businessmen and its aim is to develop the region and establish economic networks. In this group Hungary is represented by AHEAD Global (African Hungarian Economic Association for Development) and that is why we took part at the meeting. The Secretary General of the organization, Fernando Matos Rosa worked in the EU earlier and knows the Commissioner for Development, Andris Piebalgs, which established a very good working atmosphere.
The Commissioner said that in the next seven-year budget period starting in 2013 the EU plans to rely more strongly on the private sector as earlier concerning the realization of African development. According to the program accepted at the conference, there will soon be an EBCAM-EU delegation dealing with economic and investment topics to Senegal, Ghana, Zambia and Mozambique. Meetings will be more frequent and the re-creation of the EU-Africa Economic Forum was also mentioned.
What concrete plans are concerned, the Commissioner said that the two main directions of development are food safety and energy, which means that the EU resources will also have to be centered on these areas in the next two years. All this will be paired with a more flexible financial policy that will make sure the private sector could join African developments more easily and they will be able to find appropriate answers to global challenges locally.
The EU wants to make it possible for agricultural small enterprises who want to invest in Africa to get direct support, including agricultural trainings and courses too. Hungary could play an important role here. Mr. Balogh reminded the others that AHU (African-Hungarian Union) already worked out – together with the Nyíregyháza College – the concept, curriculum and methodology of a “farmer trainer” vocational school in 2008. Naturally, other institutes of tertiary education could also take part in the realization of the project.
It is important to note that in the future the EU will only support energy development that uses renewable energy resources. The Commissioner thinks Hungary has great possibilities in this area since technologies for utilizing solar energy or creating biogas are at hand. And all this matches the development concept of the EU really well, concluded Mr. Balogh. .
