On 18 June 2024, a working meeting of the consortium of European geological surveys implementing the PanAfGeo 2 project took place in Brussels.

This phase of the project is slowly ending. It will be formally completed in six months' time, and only two training courses remain to be carried out to meet the end (as of the date of the Brussels meeting).

Participants at the PanAfGeo2 project meeting in Brussels. In the second row is Prof. Dr. Stanisław Wołkowicz of PGI-PIB (fifth from the left)

The first of these, on geothermal energy, has already taken place. This training was conducted by the Polish Geological Institute-PGI (as the leader of this working group in Uganda) from 24 to 29 June 2024. The last training on mineral geology is scheduled for September/October 2024 and will take place in Morocco.

Apart from the current issues related to the project and the planned final meeting planned for 21-23 October 2024 in Livingstone (Zambia), the main discussion was focused on the next, third phase of PanAfGeo, which will have the acronym PAnAfGeo Plus. Quite a few of the details of this project are already known, but there are still many months of work, agreements and probably also a kind of trade fair ahead.

The essential, framework information for the future project with the acronym PanAfGeo Plus was presented by Catherine Ghyoot and Fabio Di Stefano, representing the EU Directorate – General for International Partnerships.

In practice, the PanAfGeo Plus project will cover practically all aspects of cooperation between the EU and African countries in the field of geology and mineral resources management. The project will most probably start in July 2025. Its importance is demonstrated by the budget it will have at its disposal – €32 million over four years (in comparison, PanAfGeo 1 – €10.3 million, PanAfGeo 2 – €9.5 million).

This project will essentially consist of 3 components:

• Component 1 – Strengthen Africa – EU institutional partnerships on Geosciences,
• Component 2 – Make more effective African Geological Surveys and the Organisation of African Geological Surveys in terms of geoscientific information and support to policy making and planning processes,
• Component 3 – Promote EU-Africa economic partnerships on raw materials value chains.

The first two components will be a continuation of the PanAfGeo project, while the third will replace the AfricaMaVal project, which will end in mid-2025. One of the products of Component 1 will be the monograph Geology of Africa (or Geosciences in Africa), already submitted two years ago by Prof Stanislaw Wolkowicz from PGI-NRI, which will contain articles describing the geological structure, resource potential, geohazards, protection of the geological heritage and probably hydrogeology of all African countries, as well as several summary papers at the continental scale.

This monograph will be published in three languages (English, French and Portuguese). The basic, English version will be developed at PIG-NRI, and the others will be produced in cooperation with BRGM (French version) and LNEG (Portuguese version).

In the case of Africa, the idea is to have the geological structure of their countries described by Africans themselves, rather than done by Americans, Australians or Europeans. It is, of course, difficult to imagine that such papers will be published in Lingala or Tswana, hence the publication will be in the three official languages used in the African countries.

Component 2 will provide training for African geological survey staff, but unlike the first two phases of the PanAfGeo project, young geologists from universities and private companies will also have a chance to apply.

During the discussion, the division into working groups has been established and a working group leader has been identified. From our point of view, it is important that Prof. Stanisław Wołkowicz will be the leader of working group WP-4, whose scope is very broad and covers geohazards (including those caused by human activity), environmental management of mining areas and geothermal energy.

PGI-NRI employees still have a serious opportunity to participate in the work of several other working groups:

• WP-1: geological mapping – in the field of hydrogeological mapping (the Czech Geological Survey is the leader),
• WP-2: mineral resources assessment (the Portuguese Geological Survey is the leader),
• WP-5: protection of geological heritage (the Spanish Geological Survey is the leader),
• WP-7: coastal and marine geology (no leader),
• WP-8 hydrogeology (the Finnish Geological Survey is the leader).

Now everything depends on the activity of our specialists at the stage of preparing the final project version, or as Jan Ciszewski, the excellent sports commentator and horse racing expert, used to say: ‘the bomb has gone up, and now all is in the horse's hands!’. As far as Component 3 is concerned, the matter is quite complicated and there will probably be numerous discussions, more or less official, in the coming months. Following the decisions taken at the EU level, 7 African countries have been identified as the so-called ‘country window’ where, based on bilateral agreements, projects dedicated primarily to the exploration of so-called critical raw materials (CRM) for the EU will be conducted. The countries identified are the Democratic Republic of Congo, Namibia, South Africa, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

PGI-NRI has indicated its preference in this regard, but the details, until final decisions are made, will not be disclosed. For those with some interest in political affairs in Africa, the selection of countries may seem quite controversial, but it should be stressed that it is political in nature and one of the main factors was the resource potential of the selected countries.

The PIG-NRI delegate, after quick consultations with the Chief National Geologist and the Director of the PGI-NRI, declared that the Polish side is interested in cooperating with one of the mentioned countries. It should be noted that the value of each such bilateral project is estimated at €2 million. It is therefore worth being at the negotiating table.

As usual, the meeting of the consortium participants for the next stages of the PanAfGeo project took place in a very businesslike but friendly atmosphere. Seven years of cooperation have meant that we are a group of people who trust each other, because this is a necessary element when carrying out such an extensive project on a continent which, on the one hand, is culturally quite close to us (especially sub-Saharan Africa), but geographic and climatic determinism has shaped a quite different behaviour of the population.

Text: Stanisław Wołkowicz