This on-line event, organized in cooperation with the United States Mission to the European Union, discussed the approaches of the EU and the U.S. to their cooperation with Africa, with a focus on economic growth, peace and security, and governance. With regards to the global COVID-19 crisis and its effect on Africa, Jennifer Cooke, Director of the Institute for African Studies at The George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs, highlighted that in “Africa as in the US, the pandemic has revealed the structural inequalities in the societies. This crisis is a big opportunity for the world to strategically cooperate and discuss how to address these inequalities globally". The US speakers pointed out that though the political attention paid to Africa is not constant in Washington, a number of positive steps have been taken as regards the U.S. Africa strategy, Prosper Africa, or the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, the new agency financing private development projects.

According to Jonas Jonsson, Head of Division for Pan-African Affairs at the EEAS, the main priorities of the new EU-Africa strategy are green transition, digital transformation, sustainable growth, peace and governance and migration and mobility. Andrew Sheriff, Head of the European External Affairs Programme at the ECDPM and Giovanni Grevi, Senior Fellow at the EPC, agreed that the main question in the EU-Africa relationship is how to translate the growing political relationship between the EU and Africa into concrete outcomes to meet the interests of both continents.