“EU funds for Africa are bad for Africans”

European funds for Africa not only do not help but could prove harmful to Africans. The warning is contained in an Oxfam report published today.
The study reveals that in the past 4 years over 1 billion euros, 26% of the total aid from the Trust Fund, have been diverted from their humanitarian purpose to finance national policies of “brutal containment of migratory flows”.
In the case of Libya, the first recipient of the funds among the 26 African countries involved, half of the resources were used to finance the Coast Guard, which – Oxfam recalls – proved to be complicit in human traffickers along the Central Mediterranean route and it operated at sea to bring back, in three years, about 40 thousand innocent men, women and children to the “Libyan concentration camps”, where they are daily exposed to torture and abuse.

Of the over 4.5 billion Euros allocated to the 26 beneficiary African countries, 328 million have been allocated to Libya: more than half of these, 160.13 million, have been used to manage migratory flows and strengthen borders.

“Wanting to stop migrations at any cost, European governments adopt short-term policies that hurt those who are most in need. African countries are effectively denied aid that should reduce poverty, prevent conflict and improve their living conditions “said Paolo Pezzati, policy advisor for the migration crisis of Oxfam Italia. The flexible nature of the Trust Fund allows individual states to pursue their internal policy priorities, closing borders and speeding up returns. The result is that the objectives of improving the living conditions of African populations, of development and economic growth, which can at the root prevent their need to migrate, end up in the background.

Italy has also done its part: it has allocated 77.3 million from the Trust Fund for programs to manage migration flows and border control and only 22 million for African countries’ socio-economic development programs.