Global Gateway in Africa

Where the flagships are

Each flagship is drawn at every African country it names, at that country's interior point. The Commission's map has one point per country and nothing finer, so the dots are spread around the point to be pointed at, not placed: a dot is a flagship in a country, not a site. Regional flagships are rings, drawn once in each country they name; 15 name no country and sit at the Commission's Africa-wide point in Chad, the one the map's EU layer uses for regional programmes.

Some flagships name a place in their text (a dam, a port, a corridor), but the Commission gives no coordinates, and none are guessed here. The five areas of partnership are the Commission's; a flagship with two areas is coloured by the first.

Who is named behind them

The pages list the "Team Europe members involved" for 119 of the 133 flagships (14 have no page). 93 name the Commission. 20 member states appear at least once, led by France (43), EIB (38), Germany (27), Netherlands (21), Belgium (11), Sweden (9). A name on the list is a partner, not a share: no page says who pays what. The member states' own agencies are national money and have their own lender pages where the site has one (France's AFD and Germany's KfW and GIZ are also on the map).

The list

Every flagship, as the Commission's map and its page give it. The title links to the Commission's page. Countries outside Africa that a flagship also names (a cable to Europe, a programme shared with Asia) are shown greyed. The milestones are the page's own words; most pages give one or two, and none gives a date or a stage.

What the money records say

There are two sets of figures for Global Gateway, and only one of them reaches a flagship. The Commission's tracker counts EUR 306.8 bn "mobilised" worldwide over 2021–2024, EUR 80.0 bn (26%) of it in Sub-Saharan Africa, about USD 89.6 bn. North Africa sits in a line with the Middle East and Türkiye (EUR 77.2 bn), so the tracker gives no African total. The tracker names no project, country or year, and "mobilised" counts the member states' banks, the EIB and the EBRD, and, by the strategy's own aim, private money, so it is not what the Union spent.

The second set is the EU institutions' own: the Commission's contracts and financing decisions and the European Investment Bank's operations, which each publishes to IATI and which are the map's EU finance layer. The IATI files carry no flagship identifier, so a flagship and a record are paired here only where the record's title, or the decision above it, plainly names the same works, plant, programme or corridor, checked by hand. 37 flagships pair with at least one record. 28 pair with 105 Commission records: EUR 688 m committed, and 10 records still in preparation with no amount. 10 pair with 10 EIB operations: EUR 923 m signed, and 1 cancelled or suspended and not counted; one has records of both. The two institutions' figures are shown side by side and never added: a Commission grant and an EIB loan to the same works are different money, and each is the institution's own share. 10 of these records started before 2021, the first year the tracker counts (the Commission's EUR 71.8 m and the EIB's EUR 155.0 m): the list takes in works the EU was funding before Global Gateway began. Neither covers the member states' development banks that many of the pages name, and only the sectors the layer keeps are searched (transport, energy, communications, water, industry and trade), so a health or education flagship's contracts are mostly outside it. NaturAfrica, the Commission's conservation programme, is the largest Commission pairing because the programme name is on every one of its contracts.

Records that say "Global Gateway"

A different cut of the same layer: 50 records name Global Gateway in their title, description or the decision above them, EUR 450 m counted, about USD 505 m (1 EUR = 1.1206 USD (ECB reference rate, 9 Oct 2026)), and 13 more are still in preparation with no amount. They are corridor programmes, support facilities and studies more than works; one of them is among the paired records above.

The corridors that Global Gateway names as strategic are on the corridors page, beside the other lists that name them; the Medusa submarine cable, a flagship here, is in the map's cables layer.

How to read this page

One record is

One flagship: one identifier on the Commission's Global Gateway map (a few flagships carry a list of identifiers and are one record). A flagship is African when the map lists it under an African country or its Sub-Saharan Africa point, or under its Mediterranean point (which mixes North Africa with the Middle East) when its page names an African country or North Africa. Regional flagships appear on the Commission's map under each country they name; here they are one record.

Location

The country's interior point, the site's usual point for a country, for every African country a flagship names; the Commission's map has one point per country too. A flagship that names no country sits at the Commission's Africa-wide point in Chad, as the map's EU layer places regional programmes. The data file, and the main map's Global Gateway layer, keep one point per flagship: the country's for a one-country flagship, the Africa-wide point otherwise.

Status

None. The Commission publishes no stage for a flagship, and the milestones on a page are undated sentences. No stage is inferred from them, and none that other trackers assign is used.

Money

None per flagship: the Commission publishes no amount for any of them. The tracker's regional figure and the EU layer's records are shown beside the list and never added to each other. The list's last two columns are what the Commission committed and what the EIB signed in the records that name the same works, in euros as published, each on its own and never added; neither is the flagship's cost or the Union's whole share.

Not here, and why

• Global Gateway projects that are not flagships. The Commission says the list is not exhaustive.
• EFSD+ guarantees, the main Global Gateway instrument, have no commitment transaction in the IATI files and leave no record on the map.
• Amounts and stages per flagship, which the Commission does not publish.

Sources and licences

• European Commission, the Global Gateway map on its Global Gateway page (its data file, data.json) and the flagships' pages under Global Gateway projects; © European Union, CC BY 4.0. Read and reshaped here: one record per flagship, country names to codes, the pages' "Key information" and milestones joined to the map's records.
• European Commission, the Global Gateway tracker on the International Partnerships Global Gateway page, "Total Global Gateway investments mobilised 2021 – 2024", its regional split only; © European Union, CC BY 4.0.
• European Commission, DG INTPA and DG NEAR IATI activity files (CC BY 4.0), as the map's EU finance layer.