Global Gateway: Expertise France mobilised for education in Team Europe

Launched by Jutta Urpilainen, European Commissioner for International Partnerships, the Regional Teachers Initiative for Africa (RTIA) represents an unprecedented investment by the European Commission, €100 million over a six-year period, to address the teacher shortage and the difficulties encountered by the profession in Sub-Saharan Africa. 

Announced in January 2023 and launched at the Global Gateway Forum in October 2023, this initiative is based on a close collaboration between UNESCO, the African Union, and a tripartite partnership composed of the agencies of three Member States (Expertise France for France, Enabel for Belgium and EDUFI for Finland).
Expertise France is the coordinating agency for the partnership and, as such, is implementing the Regional Facility for Teachers in Africa, alongside Enabel and EDUFI. At the request of African partners, the Facility will mobilise African and European expertise to address their technical assistance needs on issues related to governance and public policies on teachers, as well as professional development and teacher training. 

To more effectively address the many challenges facing teachers on the subcontinent, including in the most vulnerable situations, the Facility will firstly promote promising initiatives to include and strengthen the gender dimension, digital technologies, sustainable development, and new educational methods in teacher practices and training. Secondly, it will strengthen African research on teacher-related issues by supporting academic research projects at the initiative of European-African partnerships. 

In Sudan, the “EU Support for Basic Schoolteachers’ Qualification in Sudan” project financed by the European Union aims to address the major challenges of education in Sudan, adapting to the compelling needs brought about by the humanitarian crisis in the country.

The project aims to improve the competences and qualifications of Sudanese teaching staff in Sudan and in three neighbouring countries, despite the difficult environment of the ongoing conflict.

The programme was suspended for almost a year due to the conflict of April 2023. It restarted in April 2024 and has now been extended until December 2025. Some changes have been introduced to adapt to the emergency situation in the country. The new version of the project focuses on four main lines of action, still with the primary objective of improving the competences and qualifications of teaching staff, in particular in crisis situations (Education in Emergencies).

To ensure that the action is sustainable, an online training platform providing access for teaching staff to interactive modules and the products developed during the project, which will be digitalised, will be created and made available to the competent education authorities.

Despite the absence of personnel on the ground, Expertise France is actively contributing to the Local Education Group coordinated by the World Bank and UNESCO, the Education Cluster coordinated by UNICEF and Save the Children, and the Refugee Education Working Groups, coordinated by UNHCR, in Egypt, Ethiopia and Chad.

The Youth Academy project aims to mobilise young people for sustainable development initiatives and thereby strengthen links between Africa and Europe. This project financed by the European Union, with the participation of the Netherlands (NUFFIC), Italy (AICS) and France, represented by Expertise France which is working in collaboration with the AFD Campus, is part of a Team Europe Initiative. 

This project will contribute to building the skills of young agents of change through training, mobility, exchanges and networking. It will focus on supporting youth leadership in various fields, such as education, research, entrepreneurship, civil society, the media, and the cultural sector in Sub-Saharan Africa. Team France will organise activities to strengthen the initiatives of young leaders, to enable them to influence their communities and act as multipliers.

This will be achieved through capacity building for these initiatives and support structures in several Sub-Saharan African countries with technical assistance, peer learning, and the development of a network for experience sharing and collaborative work.

The African Union’s Continental Strategy for Technical and Vocational Education and Training, which aims to promote youth employment, highlights the importance of a paradigm shift, by moving from a supply-driven approach to formal education to a more holistic approach based on the demand of economic actors.

In response, the European Union has launched the Team Europe Initiative “Opportunity-driven Skills and VET in Africa”, a key component of the EU-Africa Global Gateway Investment Package announced at the EU-AU summit in 2022.

The overall objective is to ensure that vocational training systems in Sub-Saharan Africa match the opportunities for real and decent jobs created by European investments. With a budget of €75 million, Expertise France will be working with Belgium (with Enabel as coordinator of the partnership), Germany and Finland to implement this initiative, which will be open to more than 40 Sub-Saharan African countries.