Bulgaria has unfortunately lost some strong economic and diplomatic positions that it previously had on the African continent, according to Foreign Minister Nikolay Mladenov.

"Bulgaria has lost its reflexes with respect to Africa and this part of the world," Mladenov said on Darik Radio commenting on the 3rd EU-Africa Summit held at the beginning of the week in Libya.

"A lot of countries from Europe and Northern Africa are competing for influence in the emerging economies in Africa, which are developing very intensively. But we have lost all positions that we ad there. This is easy to explain to some extent – in the last 20 years our main focus was the integration with the EU and NATO. This takes up a lot of public, political and administrative energy. But now that we have achieved our goals we can shake off this focus and look at the concrete opportunities in the world around us," the Foreign Minister explained.

He stated that many of the African countries need engineering services, and infrastructure construction, which are things that Bulgaria has done there in the past, and in which it "still" has specialists.

Mladenov also said the Bulgarian government is considering what offers it can make to African countries in that regard but point out that it should be careful so as not to promise things that it might be unable to deliver subsequently.

During the communist period, largely as part of the policies of the Soviet Bloc's Cold War policies, Bulgaria established ties with a number of African countries, offering development assistance, and also providing university education for African students. These policies were discontinued altogether after the fall of the communist regime in 1989.

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