The European Union has launched a fund for Africa with an initial $2 billion to combat the poverty and conflict driving migration to Europe. The trust fund, unveiled at a summit with African leaders in Malta, consists largely of 1.8 billion euros ($1.93 billion) put up by the European Commission. The new money will finance projects ranging from training and small-business grants and combating food shortages to schemes directly aimed at cutting emigration and tackling radicalization and other violence.

Among the biggest concerns in both Europe and Africa is the extent to which climate change, turning vast areas around the Sahara into desert, may set large sections of Africa’s fast-growing billion-plus population on the move, both within the continent and north across the Mediterranean.

The EU leaders offered African countries aid and better access to Europe in return for help curbing chaotic migration and promises to take back more of those whom Europe expels. A 17-page Action Plan sets out dozens of initiatives. Many build on decades of stuttering cooperation between the world’s poorest continent and wealthy-but-ageing Europe.

The European Commission said it expected some 3 million asylum seekers to arrive in the EU by 2017 and that, if they were integrated into the workforce, they would boost the EU’s economic output and even improve public finances in the longer term.

An Action Plan to deal with migration from Africa to Europe in a comprehensive manner.

1. Development benefits of migration and addressing root causes of irregular migration and forced displacement
2. Legal migration and mobility
3. Protection and asylum
4. Prevention of and fight against irregular migration, migrant smuggling and trafficking in human beings
5. Return, readmission and reintegration