The Atlantic Ocean: A new frontier for global cooperation and African growth

In an increasingly fragmented world grappling with common challenges such as the global climate crisis, the Atlantic Ocean can be leveraged for Africa’s climate action, continental integration, contribution to the provision of global public goods, development, improved participation to the global economy, international cooperation, and peace and security.

The global context in which this opportunity should be seized is two-pronged.

On the one hand, in recent years, geopolitical conflict has blocked multilateral institutions,¹ fueled military expenditures,² increased barriers to investment and trade restrictions,³ and led to a surge in violent deaths and forced displacement.⁴ It is against this backdrop that internationalized civil wars in the Great Lakes,⁵ Horn,⁶ and Sahel regions,⁷ the effects of which have often been compounded by climate change, have claimed hundreds of thousands of African lives and displaced millions.⁸ Geo-economic fragmentation driven by heightened competition over global influence, technology, and manufacturing jobs and value added adds another layer of complexity.⁹ For instance, the disruption of global value chains triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war increased the number of people suffering from acute food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa by 40 million in 2020-22 alone,¹⁰ giving an indication of Africa’s vulnerability to trade imbalances.

On the other hand, nations have also demonstrated increased appetites for entering agreements with each other. Minilateralism and multi-alignment are becoming commonplace.¹¹ New international coalitions, groupings, fora, and organizations have blossomed on topics such as biodiversity,¹² clean energy,¹³ economic cooperation,¹⁴ food security,¹⁵ and technology.¹⁶ In the face of global challenges, the contribution of nations to global initiatives aiming at the delivery of global public goods is an increasingly important aspect of policymaking and smart power.¹⁷

In this context, oceans provide a fertile ground for global cooperation. Oceans are the main conduit of global trade—90% of traded goods worldwide are shipped by sea.¹⁸ Furthermore, oceans remain a largely untapped source of climate action, as they serve as “our planet’s largest carbon sink, absorbing 25% of all carbon dioxide emissions and a staggering 90% of the excess heat generated by a warming atmosphere.”¹⁹

For nations bordering the Atlantic, the Ocean offers immense opportunities. Unlike the competitive Indo-Pacific, the Atlantic remains relatively peaceful, preserved from competition over hegemony, and primed for cooperative ventures among its coastal states.²⁰ Benefiting from the presence of the U.S. and of its main partner, Europe, the Atlantic can be leveraged to advance an agenda focused on sustainable development through pacified dialogue between all states bordering the Ocean. It could provide the basis for partnerships aiming at integration through investment and trade between all these nations, thus taming and partially reversing the fragmentation witnessed globally.

The Atlantic is already home to multiple frameworks that can be mobilized. In 1986 and under Brazil’s leadership, the Zone of Peace and Cooperation of the South Atlantic (ZOPACAS) was established, creating a nuclear weapon-free zone of dialogue, peace, and security between its 24 member states in Africa and South America.²¹ More recently, the Partnership for Atlantic Cooperation was launched in September 2023 at the initiative of the U.S.²² As of September 2024, the Partnership had 42 member states across Africa, Europe, North America, South America, and the Caribbean.²³ It lies on three pillars, namely: “1) a sustainable blue economy, 2) science capacity building and exchange, and 3) ocean-based food security.”²⁴ The Atlantic Centre, a multilateral center of excellence supported by 23 countries which seeks to produce knowledge, foster political dialogue, and build maritime security-related capacity among Atlantic states, provides another example of all-Atlantic cooperation.²⁵

A number of Atlantic-related initiatives have also emerged in Africa. The Atlantic region is “home to 46% of Africa’s population, 55% of Africa’s GDP and 57% of continental trade.”²⁶ To harness the ocean’s potential, the Atlantic African States Process was launched in Rabat in 2009 and has held a number of ministerial meetings since 2022.²⁷ In another example, in 2016, the heads of state of Morocco and Nigeria officially announced the construction of a Nigeria-Morocco gas pipeline,²⁸ a planned $25-billion, 7,000 km pipeline that would connect 13 states in Northwest Africa and reach Europe.²⁹ Cross-continental initiatives connecting non-riparian African nations to the Atlantic have also been recently undertaken. These include the Zambia-DRC-Angola Lobito Corridor, which was officially endorsed by the European Union and the U.S. on the margins of the G20 Summit in September 2023 as part of the G7 Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment.³⁰ In November 2023, King Mohammed VI of Morocco announced an international initiative to “enable the Sahel countries to have access to the Atlantic Ocean” by making Morocco’s infrastructure available to landlocked countries including ports, roads, and railways.³¹ The Atlantic can thus serve as a platform to foster connectivity and solidarity between coastal, hinterland, and landlocked areas in Africa.³² Investments in economic corridors, energy linkages, and logistical hubs could enhance continental integration, enabling dialogue to ultimately build resilient continental and regional ecosystems and contribute to the successful implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area through deepened cooperation across the African Union’s Regional Economic Communities.³³

Beyond Africa and around the Atlantic Basin, a series of flagship initiatives and projects could be supported in different sectors:

• In academia, exchange programs for scientists and students (including in economics and social sciences) and between academic and research institutions across the Atlantic Basin could be encouraged.
• In agriculture, the sharing of good practices, technical cooperation, and increased technology flows can boost tropical agriculture output and strengthen food security.
• In the blue economy, working on the creation of a joint blue finance facility for riparian states could foster ocean-based food security, finance ocean science, improve ocean governance, preserve ecosystems and livelihoods, protect the environment, and provide a suitable response to climate-related challenges, particularly in developing nations.
• In network infrastructure, projects such as the Nigeria-Morocco Gas Pipline, underwritten by numerous nations, can boost regional integration through commonly managed physical networks and have positive, dynamic effects on development.
• In manufacturing, a stronger policy dialogue could take place between African and Latin American countries, which should jointly explore ways to leverage complementary strengths in commodity production and foster cross-Atlantic value chains in value-added industries, thus enabling industrial transformation and allowing countries to move up the global value chain by leveraging their own human and mineral capital and the natural, open, and vast infrastructure provided by the Ocean.
• Overall, measures should be taken to stimulate investment, and reforms should be pursued to ensure a level playing field that jointly improves the business climate for private sector companies operating or wishing to expand their activities on all shores of the Atlantic.

Irrespective of protective measures adopted by advanced economies, the Atlantic will remain a major source of livelihood for Africa and a space to be leveraged to build bridges with all Atlantic continents.³⁴

The Atlantic should receive more collective attention in Africa. It can transform into a shared, strategic space of cooperation, prosperity, and security benefitting all riparian states and beyond, with the active involvement of the civil societies, governments, and private sectors of a quadri-continental Atlantic community in the making.³⁵