“From the very beginning, the Global Gateway was described as an attempt by the European Union to compete with foreign investment funds of the Belt and Road Initiative. However, with an amount of EUR 300 billion by 2027, it is a David versus Goliath enterprise,” says Gabriele Rosana, an associate fellow at the Institute of International Affairs in Rome. China is already investing heavily in tidy energy in Africa, with much fewer constraints. “The EU operates in a system of precise rules, rates and constraints unknown to Chinese centralism,” says Rosana.
According to A test from Griffith University in Australia, energy investments under the Belt and Road Initiative in the first half of 2025 were the highest since 2013, when the initiative was launched – and it was Africa, with $39 billion, that had the highest value contracts in this sector. AND latest report from energy advisory team Ember revealed that China exported 15 GW of solar panels to Africa in the year to June 2025, representing a 60 percent year-on-year raise in these imports. It is unclear whether all of these devices will be installed – some may represent trade triangulation to circumvent tariffs – but in any case, Beijing is preparing to take advantage of the continent’s green transformation.
However, Europe also wants to seize this opportunity. “Over the last two years, competitiveness has gradually, but with increasing conviction, become a key word on the European policy agenda, alongside defence,” says Rosana. “International cooperation has also been reimagined for strategic autonomy and put at the service of the Union’s global projection at a time when, in the face of a massive reorganization of trade balances resulting from the US-China challenge, Europe must rapidly diversify its supply chains and trade.”
The EU was not alone in feeling the need to respond to China’s Belt and Road initiative. Heading into President Donald Trump’s second term, the United States also felt compelled to act. In 2021, President Joe Biden’s administration announced the international infrastructure program Build Back Better World, which was expanded to the G7 the following year and renamed the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGI). PGI’s main areas of interest were energy and Africa: in fact, two solar power plants in Angola, a wind power and storage system in Kenya, and a nickel processing plant for battery production in Tanzania appeared on the list of early American projects.
However, perhaps the most crucial infrastructure project that the West is implementing in Africa is the so-called Lobito Corridora railway line that will connect copper deposits in Zambia and cobalt mines in the DRC with the Atlantic port of Lobito in Angola. Copper is an electrifying metal; lithium, a key ingredient in batteries – both are necessary raw materials in the ecological transition, and China currently has a dominant position in the supply of both.
The African continent is therefore currently a battlefield between superpowers interested primarily in its resources. However, with a juvenile and growing population – in the sub-Saharan region – the population is estimated to raise Over the next three decades, 79 percent— and in an energy system dominated by fossil fuels, decarbonizing Africa will be crucial to achieving net zero emissions. “The choices Africa makes today,” Von der Leyen said during her September announcement, “are shaping the future of the entire world.”
This story originally appeared on WIRE Italy and was translated from Italian.