Latvia joined the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in March 2025. That is the club of countries that give aid rather than receive it. For a country that was itself an aid recipient in the 1990s, the transition happened fast.
What is less known is where Latvia's development money actually goes in Africa, and what it buys. The total budget is small — approximately EUR 1.2M across all African projects for 2025 — but the programs are specific, targeted, and increasingly building the institutional bridges that turn into commercial corridors.
#esiLV: Entrepreneurship Training for Women
The flagship program. #esiLV (translating roughly to "She Rebuilds the World") is an entrepreneurship training initiative delivered through Riga Business School. The program targets women entrepreneurs in Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, and Rwanda.
To date, 67+ women have graduated from the program. Participants receive business development training, mentorship from Latvian and local business leaders, and access to a growing alumni network.
The program is funded by Latvia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) through the LATDEV (Latvian Development Cooperation) budget line. It is not charity work in the traditional sense — it is capacity building designed to create business-capable counterparts in target markets.
Riga TechGirls: STEM in South Africa
Riga TechGirls runs coding schools for girls in South Africa, Cameroon, Egypt, and Tanzania. The program is MFA-funded and focuses on foundational programming skills — the kind that turn participants into potential tech workers or entrepreneurs.
South Africa is a key market here. The program partners with local organizations to deliver coding workshops in Johannesburg and Cape Town. The curriculum is designed in Riga and adapted for local contexts.
Agricultural Programs
Two agricultural initiatives target Africa specifically:
BICEPS and the Latvian Permaculture Association run digital agriculture education programs in Ghana, reaching an estimated 10,000 farmers. The training covers sustainable farming techniques, crop management, and digital tools for agricultural planning.
LLKC (Latvian Rural Advisory Centre) operates an agricultural competitiveness project in Rwanda. LLKC has decades of experience advising Latvian farmers through the EU accession process and post-accession modernization. The Rwanda program applies similar advisory methodology to a different agricultural context.
Riga Business School Executive Education
Beyond #esiLV, Riga Business School delivers executive education bootcamps in Namibia and Zambia. These are short-format programs aimed at mid-career professionals and government officials, covering business strategy, digital transformation, and leadership.
The programs create direct personal connections between Latvian academics and SADC professionals — the kind of relationships that turn into conference invitations, joint ventures, and procurement introductions.
The Strategy Beneath the Aid
EUR 1.2M is a rounding error in global development budgets. USAID spends more than that on a single water project. So why does it matter?
Because these programs build institutional bridges that eventually become commercial corridors. The pattern is visible at events like the Latvia-Africa Forum in May 2025, where companies like AdvanGrid and Squalio met the Zimbabwe Parliament delegation. Those connections did not materialize from nowhere. They were seeded by years of development cooperation that put Latvian institutions in contact with African counterparts.
A woman who graduated from #esiLV in Windhoek and now runs a growing business may never buy Latvian products. But she knows Latvian people, she has been to Riga, and when a Latvian company comes looking for a local partner in Namibia, her name is in someone's phone.
Development cooperation is the long game. Latvia plays it with modest resources but consistent focus. The EUR 1.2M buys relationships, not headlines. And relationships are what turn trade data from Eurostat into actual containers on actual ships.
Sources: MFA Latvia development cooperation program pages; Latvia-Africa Forum 2025 coverage.