What is the Africa-EU Migration, Mobility and Employment Partnership?

The Africa-EU Migration, Mobility and Employment (MME) Partnership was launched during the 2nd Africa-EU Summit of Heads of State and Government in December 2007 in Lisbon, where the Joint EU-Africa Strategy and the First Action Plan (2008-2010) were adopted. The partnership aims to ensure sustainable development and the implementation of relevant international agreements and declarations, relying in particular on the Tripoli Declaration on Migration and Development, the Ouagadougou Action Plan to Combat Trafficking in Human Beings, Especially Women and Children and the Ouagadougou Declaration and Plan of Action for Promotion of Employment and Poverty Alleviation.

What is new?

A second Action Plan was adopted at the third Africa-EU Summit that took place in Tripoli on 29-30 November 2010.  Building on the achievements of the first action plan, the second Action plan identifies the areas of cooperation for the years 2011-2013.  In addition, higher education appears as a more visible and integrated part of this partnership. The new action plan has two main strands: (a) enhancing dialogue, and (b) identifying and implementing concrete actions.

Enhancing dialogue

The major challenge for the period 2011-2013 will be to further strengthen and enrich the political and policy dialogue on migration, mobility and employment as well as tertiary education issues between the two continents, whilst encompassing dialogues and cooperation taking place on national and regional levels.

Dialogue on all these topics will in particular focus on the question of how to enhance coherence and synergies between migration, mobility, employment, education policies and development/ poverty reduction strategies.

Implementing actions

The second action plan identifies a series of actions encompassing the inter-regional and inter-continental dimension of the partnership. A number of concrete actions have been envisaged:

• The Facilitation of the dialogue between the partners through a Support Project
• The establishment of an African Remittances Institute which should provide for a better, more effective and safer remittances’ transfer system
• The implementation of the Human Trafficking Initiative to strengthen protection, prevention and prosecution of trafficking in human beings;
• The Diaspora Outreach Initiative will establish a cooperation framework to engage the Diaspora in the development of Africa
• The Observatory on Migration will create a network of researchers and research centres
• The launch of the Decent Work Initiative extending social protection coverage in particular in the informal economy;
• The Labour market governance and capacity building initiative aims at strengthening the institutional capacity of the labour market institutions in AfricaTthe organisation of a number of regional and sub-regional fora on employment, labour, social protection and labour migration.
• Improve the access to finance and guarantees for the poorest and undeserved
• The further implementation of the Nyerere Programme providing scholarships to African students, scholars and academic staff
• The launch of the Pan-African University, a network of African higher education and research institutions;
• Review the state of implementation of mutual recognition of higher education certificates and qualifications in Africa through African Higher Education Harmonisation and Tuning.

For more details, see the fiches on priority intiatives