It was a great honour for the Hanns Seidel Foundation to engage with German Federal Foreign Minister Dr Johann Wadephul and MP Stephan Mayer, member of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the German Bundestag, during their official visit to South Africa for an exchange on the future of German-South African and German-African relations. The Minister was accompanied by a high-level delegation of senior business representatives.

Critical raw materials are shaping the global geoeconomic landscape. For European industry, access to these materials is essential to maintain competitiveness. For resource-rich African nations, they offer potential for their own industrialization. This will bring Europe and Africa closer together.

At a joint event co-hosted by the Cape Town Press Club, the Catholic Parliamentary Liaison Office, and the Hanns Seidel Foundation, Minister Velenkosini Hlabisa, Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, gave the keynote address.

This week, Thomas Huber, Member of the Bavarian State Parliament (MdL) and Spokesperson for Social Policy of the CSU Parliamentary Group in the Bavarian State Parliament, officially inaugurated the new training kitchen at Bergzicht Training & Development in Stellenbosch.

That was one of the key questions discussed at this year's Western Cape multi-party Seasonal School for Councillors under the theme "Economic Governance and Local Economic Development: The Strategic Role of Municipal Councillors in Advancing Developmental Local Government"

"Strategic Alliances: How critical raw materials are reshaping European-African relations" - We co-hosted this event with our partners in the collaboration on "The Future of EU-Africa Relations": the Federation of German Industries (BDI), Megatrends Afrika and the Institute for Security Studies.

This is the topic of the second Spotlight article in our cooperation on the Future of EU-Africa Relations. We are co-publishing the article together with our partners in the collaboration project, Megatrends Afrika, the Federation of German Industries and the African Futures and Innovation Program at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria.