From 2025 to 2029, we are supporting the National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE) in training young people working in, or aspiring to work in, Ethiopia's rapidly changing financial sector. The SWIFT (Skilled Workforce for Innovation and Financial Sector Transformation) Program in Ethiopia is a partnership between NBE and the Mastercard Foundation aimed at equipping, through the Ethiopia Institute for Financial Studies (EIFS), about 100,000 young people with market-relevant skills and capabilities that will enable them to drive inclusion, innovation and transformation in the country’s financial sector.

Global trade has entered a new phase of unpredictability and lack of transparency. This calls for reliable sources providing facts and data that traders and interested persons can resort to. On behalf of the European Commission, we manage the GSP Hub website – https://gsphub.eu/ until the end of 2028. The purpose of the website is to inform interested persons about the GSP and its implementation, as well as relevant information about the beneficiary countries, notably regarding their exports to the EU under the Scheme and implementation of the GSP conventions.

The final report for the evaluation of the AfDB's Results-Based Financing (RBF) has now been published.

Since 2017, RBF is the AfDB's financing instrument to support African government priority programmes upon the achievement of pre-agreed results, using and improving the program’s institutions and system. The main focus of RBF is on results as opposed to the focus on inputs in typical project financing and on policy reforms in the case of programme-based operations.

The final report for the ex post evaluation of the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) between the EU and six SADC countries - Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa has just been published. It consists of three volumes: the main report provides the main findings, conclusions and recommendations, volume 2 includes a set of appendices with more detailed information on bilateral trade as well as the social, environmental and human rights baselines and screening and scoping for EPA effects, and volume 3 presents four sector case studies on the effects of the EPA on the automotive, sugar, poultry, and renewable energy sectors.

The final report for the evaluation of the AfDB's Economic and Sector Work (ESW) - aka the research work conducted by the Bank - has now been published. The evaluation focused on the planning and budgeting of ESW at the Bank, the technical quality of Bank’s ESW, and the results of ESW, mainly to inform the implementation of the Bank’s Knowledge Management Strategy (KMS) 2022–2031 and the AfDB’s Ten-year Strategy for 2024–2033

Download the evaluation summary report.

More information on the evaluation is available from the AfDB website.

On 04 December, the Council of the EU adopted two decisions to sign the Advanced Framework Agreement (AFA) and the interim Trade Agreement (iTA) with Chile, which together constitute modernised versions of the EU-Chile Association Agreement currently in place. The updated agreements were signed on 13 December 2023.

We supported the negotiation process by conducting a Sustainability Impact Assessment for the Modernisation of the EU-Chile Trade Agreement, which was completed in May 2019.