What does real partnership between Europe and Africa actually look like in 2026? In this episode of the Liberal Europe […]
What does real partnership between Europe and Africa actually look like in 2026?
In this episode of the Liberal Europe Podcast, Ricardo Silvestre is joined by Rui Santos, CEO of CESO Development Consultants, a Portuguese firm celebrating its 50th anniversary this year and one of the most experienced implementers of European Commission projects across Africa, Latin America, and Asia.
The conversation unpacks how EU cooperation has shifted away from the old donor-beneficiary model towards genuine, shoulder-to-shoulder collaboration. They discuss the EU’s strategic partnership programmes with countries like Angola, the Global Gateway initiative, and PROCULTURA PALOP-TL/UE, a cultural ecosystem-building project across Portuguese-speaking African countries and East Timor.
Along the way, Rui reflects on what 35 years in international development have taught him about reputation, patience, and the long-distance run that meaningful cross-border work demands.
This podcast is produced by the European Liberal Forum in collaboration with Movimento Liberal Social and Fundacja Liberté!, with the financial support of the European Parliament. Neither the European Parliament nor the European Liberal Forum are responsible for the content or for any use that be made of.
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And you can also get to know IPDAL here.
Ricardo: I’m here with Rui Santos. Rui, thank you so much for coming to the podcast.
Rui: My pleasure.
Ricardo: You are a very rare Portuguese guest on the podcast, in the sense that no one can complain that I just have Portuguese guests on my mind.
Rui: I have a huge responsibility.
Ricardo: There you go. Tell us what is needed for a company like CESO to remain on top of what is a very competitive game — particularly when it involves having the trust of an organisation like the European Commission, and for so long. What is the policy and the politics behind CESO’s success?
Rui: It’s a very interesting question, because this is a market that is very difficult to get into. There are three main aspects to take into consideration that justify the fact that we are already inside this market — we exist, and we turned 50 this year. CESO turns 50 this year. We were created in 1976, and we have been working with the European Commission since, I think, 1987. We created a story of partnership with our European institutions based on three assets. The first thing required is that the shareholders invest in the company. What does that mean? It means you should have stock capital that is significant if you want to attend the procedures and contracts of significance. You can’t be distributing the results among shareholders. Every single year you have to build from scratch. Just so you have an idea: when we started working with the European Commission, our joint stock capital was 50,000 euros, and nowadays it’s 1.7 million euros. Why? Because we have reinvested in the company. The money we earned, at least part of it, in order to have capital solid enough to justify being included on short lists for the procedures and then being awarded contracts of a certain significance. So the willingness of shareholders to invest in the company is the first important thing. And there you see why it’s important to be a long-distance runner — precisely because this is a long-distance run itself. It takes time, and you have to be willing to invest yourself in a long-term strategy. That’s the first one. The second one: this is a business of reputation. You must have a solid reputation with both your clients and your partners. And having a solid reputation with your partners is as important as with your clients, because you need strong partners to be competitive in most of the international tender procedures organised by the European Commission. They are very demanding — and demanding on purpose, because the Commission wants different stakeholders from different EU countries to establish consortia. This is part of the whole idea of building a European community of interests, of businesses, of efforts. In fact, this approach by the Commission opened the door for CESO to expand into other geographies beyond the traditional Lusophone African countries. Why? Because we joined consortia with other EU partners. We learned from them, and we gained access to different markets. And you can only have access to solid partners if you have a solid reputation — meaning you have transparent business practices, you pay on time, you deliver quality. These things might look very straightforward, but in our business tradition in Europe, paying on time is not one of the most common features. There are certain things we have to adjust if we want to create a solid reputation. So having a solid reputation — paying on time, delivering quality, transparent business practices — is critical. If you have that reputation, then for instance, we team up with GIZ from Germany. We team up with DAI, with DT Global. These are big companies in Europe. We team up with McKinsey. They only team up if they believe you have a rock-solid reputation, and that you will deliver quality. And if you have good partners, you are also on your path to having a solid reputation with your clients. So if you don’t build this reputation — again, long-distance run — this takes time. You don’t do it from one day to the next. That, I would say, is the second element. And then you have to be ahead of trends. You have to anticipate what history is telling you, adapt, and be flexible enough to follow the trends and adjust your business strategies accordingly.
Ricardo: We were together at the sixth edition of Africa XXI. This is an event organised by our friends here in Portugal at IPDAL — I’m going to put the reference in the show links. The topic of the event was “Africa at the Centre of Global Strategy.” I was very impressed by your talk, and immediately I wanted to have you on the podcast, because you have several projects running, and there’s a level of not only commitment but of involvement of those stakeholders that I thought was just genius. I want to go into it. Let’s start with one. Within the scope of the Global Gateway, you’re working in the fields of green transition, sustainable economics, and digitalisation in African countries. When you put all this together — where do you get the information, how do you process it, how do you make your projects and your outcomes? Tell us a little about how the machinery works.
Rui: OK. We have been specialising, in the last 10 years, in a specific line of projects by the European Commission called the strategic partnership projects. These strategic partnership programmes are mostly a way the EU has found to establish links between civil society organisations, economic agents, and the public sector — between European countries and emerging economies. We have been managing the strategic partnership between the EU and Angola for the last eight years. The same for the last eight years: the strategic partnership between the EU and Latin America, also with Canada, with India, and with Indonesia. These strategic partnerships work the following way. There is a set of joint strategic goals, defined typically for five years, which is the multi-annual financial framework of the European Commission. So the EU discusses with the partners — with Angola, Cape Verde, Latin America and the Caribbean — and sets a series of strategic goals to be implemented through common dialogue. Those common dialogues are then translated into action dialogues between specific stakeholders from both sides. Our role is to bring those stakeholders together. It can be an event. It can be a business trip. It can be, for instance, the EU Business Forum that we are organising starting tomorrow in Angola. It can be a study on renewable energy investment opportunities between Argentina and Europe. So we can prepare studies, organise international events, organise B2Bs. The governments and the partners define the strategic goals; then those strategic goals have to be implemented in the field with specific activities. We organise and assist the EU delegations across the world in running these events, which later translate into partnerships, investments, and agreements signed between the two parties. So it’s a way of bringing the policy level closer to the life of the citizen, closer to the life of companies, closer to the life of public administrations, closer to the life of investors. It’s a totally different mindset compared to the traditional development cooperation of the past, which was a relationship between donor and beneficiary. We have moved towards dialogue between partners.
Ricardo: Let me interrupt you on that, because it’s another thing I wanted to talk to you about. Maybe you can blend your two responses on this. The other thing I noticed during the event with our friends at IPDAL was exactly this message you just mentioned: African countries, African stakeholders, African politicians, African people in the field — they want to be partners in the process, not be on the receiving end of something completely top-down coming from Europe.
Rui: Yes. In fact, I think there has been a substantial change in the expectations our partners have — in Africa, in Latin America, and I would say also in Asia. Our partners no longer expect that we come with a bag of money and start by building schools and infrastructure, acting a little like white saviours. That’s no longer the expectation. Our partners don’t want that. They want to be partners, and they want to establish relationships of mutual interest. In this regard, it means it’s no longer only a public affair. It also becomes an affair of investors, of companies, of universities, of NGOs — everything that promotes local economic development in a sustainable way is supposed to be part of this dialogue. So the perspective is: we develop joint strategic goals that are part of public policies, but then we have to implement them on the ground with partners. And that is exactly the key word — with partners from both sides. This is a substantial change in the mindset of the relationship between Europe and these emerging economies. It’s not only public sector; it’s implemented in the field through private investors, universities, research units, and think tanks, and they expect to find partners on both sides. Europeans expect to find partners in the emerging economies, and the emerging economies expect to find partners on the European side. If we take the overarching public policy aside, it defines the guidelines — but on the ground, we implement this shoulder to shoulder, without any hierarchy between donor and beneficiary. So if a university in Angola wants to team up with a university in Spain, they can dialogue between themselves as partners. There is no one who is the beneficiary and another who is the donor. That is part of the public policy. But in the field, this is implemented by stakeholders from both sides on equal terms. And this is what our partners in the emerging economies actually expect. They expect to establish partnerships. They don’t expect us to come up with a solution and deliver it. That is no longer the expectation. I think we are already one step ahead of that phase.
Ricardo: You have another project called PROCULTURA PALOP-TL/UE — and this is a very important project, because it works in the cultural dimension. You train cultural agents. Please tell us a little about that one.
Rui: It’s a very interesting example of something I cherish a lot, because it embodies the idea that we have to work as part of an ecosystem — public, private, profit, non-profit — all coming together, finding common solutions, and working side by side to achieve the same goals. PROCULTURA is part of the PALOP-TL programme funded by the EU, which is a regional programme for all Portuguese-speaking African countries plus East Timor. It’s a very unusual kind of regional programme. What was our role? Our role was to implement the project on behalf of Instituto Camões, which received delegated responsibility from the European Commission. That was the structure. What is the project’s aim? It aims to strengthen the cultural ecosystem in all the Portuguese-speaking African countries and East Timor. By doing what? By training cultural agents and cultural producers, and training them to be sustainable in the future. What do we mean by this? Rather than depending only on grants from national budgets — which are typically very limited for culture in these emerging economies — they need to seek funding from a variety of sponsors all around the world: the European Commission, UNESCO, big charities that also promote this. So we train them on how to design their own projects, submit proposals to secure funding, and become more sustainable in developing their cultural projects. Why is this so important? Because if you look at the Lusophone countries — Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, São Tomé, just to mention these — they have huge tourism potential. And one of the things you need to develop tourism is cultural products. You must have cultural productions that give people more than just going to the beach and taking nice photos for Instagram. You have to have things to do afterwards. And producing culture is also part of developing the tourism sector. So the overall objective of the project is to strengthen this ecosystem, give it the tools to be sustainable, and make it part of a bigger picture — the development of a key sector, tourism, which is part of the development of the economies and societies of all these countries. This is being done with EU funding, implemented by a Portuguese state institution that teams up with a private company. That private company, in turn, supports non-state actors — cultural producers — in becoming more sustainable and less dependent on the state. All of this is exactly the expression of what I believe a partnership between Europe and Africa and other emerging economies should look like: the state defines the goals, and then it goes to society, to the stakeholders in the field, to implement that strategy and find the best assets and the best efforts available to deliver impact.
Ricardo: And apart from developing tourism, as you mentioned, it has the added benefit of involving local populations, who are then exposed to this culture — their own culture — which strengthens civil society as well.
Rui: Exactly. If we look only from the perspective of strengthening civil society, having cultural production is central, it’s fundamental. And the way it is being done — with this joint effort between public and private, profit and non-profit — is the path of the future. But there is a lot of resistance to this, you know, a lot of resistance.
Ricardo: Well, naturally. But you’re doing tremendous work, and we commend you for it. Now, we only have a couple more minutes to finish our conversation. I want to invite you right away to come back to the podcast. We have other projects to talk about, and some outcomes you may want to share with us. But for now, tell us — where can people follow the work being done by CESO and yourself, if you want to share your footprint?
Rui: We are all across social media, so you can find us on LinkedIn. We also have our website, ceso.pt. I have a strong presence on LinkedIn too. We also have an academy, CESO Academy, which is a non-profit alongside our institution that provides training oriented towards strengthening the capacities of consultants and experts who want to join our industry. It’s a vehicle for us to share what we do and how we do it — to train professionals. So if you search for CESO Development Consultants on LinkedIn, you’ll find us. If you search for CESO Academy, it will also be there. Nowadays we communicate a lot through LinkedIn, and the same for me — you’ll certainly find me there.
Ricardo: I’m going to put all the links in the podcast show notes so that people can follow this and get to know more about the academy and the work done by CESO. The man is Rui Santos. This was a delight. Thank you so much, and keep doing the amazing work you do.
Rui: Ricardo, it was a pleasure to be with you and to share the experience and the work we have been doing for five decades — not me personally for five decades, because I’ve been doing this for 35 years — but it was really a pleasure. And that’s the message: it’s a long-distance run, but it’s worthwhile. It gave me everything I expected. It gave me a vision of the world.