BERLIN — Angela Merkel wants to be remembered as the German chancellor who brought growth to Africa.

Under pressure to stem the numbers of migrants making their way to Europe, Merkel is looking to make fostering economic ties between the world’s richest countries and its poorest continent one of her legacy issues — and Africa has received the message.

“We really pay homage to Ms. Merkel’s will,” Alpha Condé, the president of Guinea and the current chairperson of the African Union, said in an interview on the sidelines of this year’s G20 summit. “It’s really an important turning point for cooperation with Africa.”

Merkel’s plan? Pushing private investment in Africa through individual one-on-one contracts between rich nations and African countries, with the aim of boosting a sluggish economy. Sub-Saharan Africa's growth was 3 percent in 2015 falling to 1.3 percent in 2016, according to the World Bank — the region's worst economic performance in two decades.

“Africa is our immediate neighborhood,” she said at the end of the G20 summit, launching a partnership concept that builds heavily on the initiative “Compact with Africa,” which carries the thumbprint of her finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble.

African Union Chairperson Condé, whose own country is not among the seven initial partner countries, applauded the initiative, adding that “the compact is a new form of financing that will better help us solve the issue of migration.”

'Africa is coming'

It was migration that brought Africa's prosperity to the forefront of political debate in Merkel’s home country.

For years, Germany did not experience any large-scale arrivals of undocumented migrants from outside Europe, in part due to its geographic location, and as a result it paid little attention to economic development south of the Mediterranean.

In 2015 however, when almost a million asylum seekers — mostly from war-torn Syria or Afghanistan — arrived in Germany, the country began to debate the question of how to control a potential influx of migrants to Europe.

As migrants increasingly reach the Continent by sea from Africa, the debate has shifted to how to prevent people from leaving their home countries.

“Africa is coming,” ran the front-page headline on a weekly magazine published by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung last week, showing a giant black foot leaving the African continent.

Against this backdrop, and as voters are heading to the ballots in around two months, Merkel is eager to send out the message that she's tackling the issue.

“If there’s too much hopelessness in Africa, of course there will be young people who say they need to find a life elsewhere in the world,” Merkel said last month during a preparatory G20 Africa summit, where she welcomed nine African leaders to Berlin.

“By cooperating with those countries we are also creating more security again for ourselves,” she added.

'No lessons learned'

The political message to her electorate aside, migration experts doubt Merkel's strategy will prove successful in preventing people from coming.

"The narrative is: More investment will lead to jobs being created and then people stay in their home countries,” said Barbara Sennholz-Weinhardt of the anti-poverty NGO Oxfam. “However, it is wrong to see private investment and development cooperation as a way to contain migration.”

This, she warned, “dismisses many lessons learned during the past decades on how sustainable development cooperation should be done,” adding: “Empirical evidence strongly suggests that migration makes a positive contribution to development due to migrants' remittances."

The positive effect of outbound migration is the elephant in the room when rich countries and developing nations discuss the issue: While destination countries are interested in keeping migration down, many developing countries profit economically from the money sent home by those who leave.

Aware of this, the German government recently released a potpourri of initiatives to push development: besides the “Compact with Africa,” there is a “Marshall Plan for Africa” and a "Pro! Afrika” plan focused on digitalization.

“All of this was uncoordinated, everyone became involved suddenly,” complained Uwe Kekeritz, a German member of parliament and the Green party’s spokesperson on development policy. “But the issue of refugees had to be picked up somehow.”

Kekeritz called it “naïve” to assume that living conditions will automatically improve in African countries if private investment is boosted, adding: “The past has shown us that big investment often leads to ecological catastrophes, which then, in turn, lead to humanitarian catastrophes."

In addition, he said, it will be largely the wealthier countries in Africa that will profit from the initiative, while many of the 34 countries in Africa that the U.N. considers “least developed countries” (LDC) could go away empty-handed.

Guinean President Condé, whose country is among those LDCs, demanded that along with investment partnerships, European countries provide financial guarantees for their companies investing in Africa.

In addition, “more flexibility is necessary, especially with regard to debt,” he told POLITICO, adding that when African countries' debt levels start to climb, the International Monetary Fund "starts to cry.”

Over to Argentina

Little has been announced when it comes to details for the “Compact with Africa,” apart from the list of seven initial partner countries: Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Ghana, Morocco, Rwanda, Senegal and Tunisia.

“The only thing now is to know how to continue once … Germany no longer holds the G20 presidency,” Condé said. “Our preoccupation now is to ensure that this continues."

Argentina takes over the G20 presidency from Germany in 2018. Argentine President Mauricio Macri's cabinet chief, Marcos Peña, told POLITICO that Buenos Aires was committed to continuing the initiative. Diplomats, however, cautioned privately that the South American country has many development issues much closer to hand and has limited traditional links to Africa.

Merkel can be expected to push the Argentines to continue with the "Compact with Africa" initiative. “We are the driving force,” the German chancellor said in Hamburg. “This is only the beginning.”

Victor Brechenmacher contributed reporting.