The lack of appropriate water-related skills and capacity in some parts of Africa and the wide-spread institutional fragmentation within Africa as well as between Africa and the EU is a major obstacle to meeting the Sustainable Development Goals and addressing water crises, many with severe climate change implications. Many initiatives have been created to address the fragmentation of the water sector within Africa and internationally but significant collaboration gaps still exist for internationalizing European water initiatives. This is reflected in the table below.

From this table, one can conclude that - except for networking among policy makers and financiers – there are:

• Very limited ‘horizontal’ networking opportunities between Africa and the EU across the various categories,
• Very limited ‘vertical’ networking opportunities between Africa and the EU that include the full range of stakeholders.

At best, these interactions can be conceived to exist via some of the global networking initiatives, but with less focus and less emphasis on the Africa-EU interactions. This is the gap AfriAlliance addresses, by setting up an umbrella network to galvanise existing networks and institutions to facilitate knowledge exchange within Africa and between Africa and the EU.