By Nicoletta Dentico

A year has passed since the Italy-Africa summit, where the Meloni government launched the "Plan for Africa" in Rome, in the presence of 25 African heads of state, 11 foreign ministers, representatives of the EU, the African Union, the United Nations, and financial institutions. The aim was to "write a new page" and promote "a bridge for shared growth between Italy and African nations." The summit outlined the main areas of intervention of the plan, named after ENI founder Enrico Mattei: education and training, health, agriculture, water, and energy. It also formalized pilot projects in nine countries (Algeria, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Morocco, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Tunisia), with a promise to expand to other African states. At the beginning of this year, Prime Minister Meloni announced that Angola, Ghana, Mauritania, Tanzania, and Senegal would be added to the plan in 2025.  

The timing of the initiative stems from an intelligent political intuition, in the context of the transition to a new legislature in Europe, the irreversible decline of France’s reputation in Africa, and the significant budget cuts for African cooperation by Germany, France, and the UK. These circumstances enable Italy to propose a new, supposedly equal partnership with the continent—at least on paper. However, at the Rome summit last year, the president of the African Union had elegantly pointed out that a truly equal model of interaction remained elusive. Such was the African institutional counterpart’s reaction.  

The Italian government committed to an initial investment of over €5.5 billion, including loans, grants, and guarantees: approximately €3 billion from the Italian Climate Fund and around €2.5 billion from development cooperation. These funds are largely insufficient given the ambition of the plan. Both the Meloni government and the African leaders are well aware of this circumstance. Yet, this is also the reason why Italy has sought to involve international financial institutions, multilateral development banks, the European Union, and other donors to devise a broader financing strategy. This includes linking the Mattei Plan to the G7 Infrastructure Plan, chaired by Italy in 2024. Additionally, the President of the European Commission confirmed that the Mattei Plan would be integrated with the Global Gateway, the EU’s €150 billion investment in Africa launched in 2022.   

Despite the grand rhetoric, Italy can in no way achieve its ambitions alone. In addition to financial constraints, a significant shortage of human resources must be factored in. Some Italian parliamentarians who have followed the process closely have noted that only a handful of people are currently working on this plan, which could instead be key to relaunching Italy's role in multilateral organizations. Furthermore, well before the Meloni government, Italian authorities have lost their institutional capacity for broad and in-depth consultations with relevant stakeholders—academic institutions and civil society organizations, in both Italy and Africa. Indeed, this capacity for genuine dialogue and engagement had been a defining trait of Enrico Mattei's original vision for an equal partnership with African nations in the ‘50s, before he was assassinated in 1962.  

After a year, the Mattei Plan remains an enigma, including for those who have closely monitored its genesis. Opinions about it are divided. Some proponents see it as an opportunity that is too early to evaluate, while critics view it as a mere rebranding of old Italian cooperation projects. The missionary sector is particularly vocal in criticizing the plan, and some preliminary media investigations have exposed the Mattei Plan’s subordination to the interests of a few major industrial players—ENI being the first and foremost, but not the only one. The Italian magazine Altreconomia has shed light for example on Bonifiche Ferraresi (BF) and its late-November agreement with the defense industry Leonardo to address global agro-industrial challenges and climate change—an agreement linked to the Mattei Plan. The agreement aims to conduct research and development in regions of mutual interest, including in some of the countries listed in the Mattei Plan, while promoting biodiversity and sustainable development in full collaboration with local communities.    

The Mattei Plan coordinator, Fabrizio Saggio, alongside Minister Lollobrigida and BF, has visited Algeria to launch "the most significant Italian agro-industrial project on the southern Mediterranean shore" and they have also visited Ghana, where a project covering 7,500 hectares will be devoted to cultivating maize, soy, wheat, rice, tomatoes, and bananas.  

At this stage, it remains unclear which industrial powerhouse will take control of the health sector within the Mattei Plan, alongside the select few major NGO players that already dominate the Italian cooperation scene. What is quite evident, though, is that the health component, currently limited to Côte d'Ivoire, exhibits a concerning imbalance. On one hand, the operational strategy rightly focuses on health system strengthening and improving access to and quality of primary healthcare services (maternal and child health, endemic infectious diseases, and chronic illnesses). This continues a long-standing Italian approach to health cooperation in Africa, prioritizing health system development and workforce training. A notable and innovative aspect of the plan is the integration of a health and energy component, promoting safer and more efficient cooking technologies to reduce household air pollution, which contributes to 3.7 million premature deaths annually, particularly among women and children in sub-Saharan Africa.  

However, the other side of the plan’s health agenda is heavily skewed towards digital health technologies and the involvement of private healthcare players. The focus is on developing telemedicine platforms connecting African healthcare facilities with specialists in Italy, satellite-linked mobile clinics, and bio-surveillance under the "One Health" concept, along with geoinformation tools for identifying infectious disease risk areas.  

Given the current state of Italy’s struggling public healthcare system, this telemedicine initiative seems more oriented towards expanding the private Italian healthcare businesses into Africa, rather than genuinely improving healthcare access for African populations. Nothing new under the sun. This strategy after all perfectly aligns with the World Bank and development finance’s strategies, which prioritize private actors and leveraging the private sector in health, including in the name of Universal Health Coverage (UHC). Several NGOs have quietly adapted to these policies. The Mattei Plan is likely to adopt and integrate projects of blended finance, a widely criticized and dangerous funding model that many international civil society organizations have consistently opposed. Research by groups such as Oxfam and Sathi has repeatedly shown that such approaches lead to a deeply inequitable and commercialized health system, with devastating consequences for the right to health. 

Just recently, Bloomberg published an investigation exposing severe violations of health rights perpetrated in the name of development finance, using public funds from European countries. 

Lastly, there is a glaring contradiction between the health and agriculture components of the Mattei Plan. While the health strategy promotes the One Health approach, the agricultural strategy introduces the industrial farming model that has already worn out the quality of soils on other continents through the expansion of monocultures and the increased use of pesticides and chemicals, which have disruptive effects on human and environmental health. These substances poison the continent’s future and fail to address Africa’s food insecurity, on the rise since 2015. In the early days of 2025, a broad coalition of civil society networks in Uganda warned against pesticides, ‘silent killers’ as the World Health Organisation (WHO) figures put it, calling for their ban. 

After centuries of Western predation, dialogue with Africa unfortunately remains marred by deep structural injustices, a grim legacy that binds African governments. African countries, for example, often demand to implement unsustainable food systems to ‘stay on the market’ and thus repay their debts to creditors, in a game of elites challenged by new generations, as we have seen in Kenya. But agribusiness contributes to the loss of biodiversity, erodes ecosystems by exposing African populations to contact with pathogen vectors and other potential climate shocks, in a crisis spiral that the Mattei Plan does not even dream of considering, let alone affecting.  

The Mattei Plan method must be new, the government insisted, in view of the prospects for economic growth on the African continent. The risk of once again being confronted with ‘dreams produced by others, during a sleepless night in which the main stakeholders will not be invited to the collective dream’, as Felwine Sarr wrote in his magnificent Afrotopia, has not dissipated. ‘Certainly prosperity is a desire shared by peoples. It is less certain that they all share a mechanistic, rationalist type of relationship with the economy, which subjects the world and its resources to an unbridled exploitation of the profit of a minority, balancing living conditions,' Sarr continues. It remains to be seen whether the Mattei Plan will leave African interlocutors with the possibility of other imaginaries, other epistemologies. It is difficult to cherish too many illusions.  

This article was originally published by CeSPI (Centro Studi di Politica Internazionale) and is available in Italian here.