Research is only useful if it leads somewhere.
Alongside our research and podcast, Meridian17 builds practical tools that help businesses, policymakers, and organisations navigate the Africa–Europe partnership in practice — not just in theory.
Global Gateway Africa Tracker.
The EU's Global Gateway Initiative has committed over €300 billion to infrastructure projects worldwide, with a major focus on Africa. This tracker maps every confirmed project across the continent — sourced directly from the EU Commission's official project database and enriched with pillar classification, phase assessment, and location data.
- Interactive Africa map with project markers sized by investment scale and coloured by pillar
- Five GGI pillars: Digital, Energy, Transport, Health, and Education & Research
- Five-stage phase tracking from Announced through to Completed, with filter controls
- Official EU source data — every project links to its EU Commission detail page
The Data bank.
What the parliaments, ministries, central banks and EU and AU institutions we follow have said and done about the Africa–Europe relationship, tagged by country, institution and theme, in the source's own words. Built on part of Meridian17's own knowledge repository: it covers the sources we follow, not everything, and grows as our research does.
- Fifteen sources today, from the European Parliament to the Tweede Kamer, South Africa's parliamentary committees and the Central Bank of Kenya, each listed with the date we started following it
- Filter by country, theme, source, kind, language and period; every item links to the original
- Nothing written by a machine: a written scope note decides what belongs, and a person checks what was left out every week
Africa–EU Trade Pulse.
An interactive visualisation of annual export flows from ten leading African economies to individual EU member states, sourced from the UN Comtrade database. Select a country on the map, explore its EU export destinations, and drill down into product-level data. An early prototype demonstrating the kind of data tools Meridian17 is developing.
Explore the data →
Africa–Europe FDI Tracker.
European investment in Africa is often cited but rarely mapped in detail. This tool draws on Eurostat's bilateral foreign direct investment position data to show which EU member states hold the largest investment stakes in which African economies, and how those positions have shifted over time.
Select a year, explore the maps, and click any country to see the full picture of its investment relationships across both continents.
- EU-to-Africa view showing which member states have the largest outward FDI positions in African economies
- Africa-from-EU view showing which African countries attract the most European investment, and from where
- Historical trends from 2013 to 2024, with bar charts and trend lines for each bilateral relationship
- Honest data caveats on routing effects, reporting gaps, and the limits of the immediate-counterpart methodology
Tools built from research, not alongside it.
Most think tanks produce research and leave it to others to turn it into practice. We do not think that is good enough. Every tool Meridian17 builds grows directly out of our research — it is a practical expression of what the evidence shows and what businesses actually need.
The Global Gateway Tracker is the clearest example: it exists because our research kept running into the same question, which of the announced EU projects in Africa are actually being built, and no one could answer it from a single place.
More tools will follow, each rooted in a specific research question and designed for a specific user. If you have a need that you think a Meridian17 tool could address, we would like to hear from you.
Get in touch →What comes next.
As our research programme develops, we will build additional tools that translate findings into something businesses can use.
Investment risk explorer
A tool helping European investors understand and contextualise risk perceptions around African markets — comparing perceived risk with actual investment performance data.
Business sentiment tracker
An interactive dashboard drawing on our Beat of Business annual data, allowing users to track how African business sentiment toward European partnership evolves over time.
Partnership matchmaker
A structured resource helping African and European businesses identify potential partners based on sector, geography, and strategic objectives.