Frontex remains committed to long-term cooperation with external partners in regions neighbouring the EU (Western Balkans, Turkey, Eastern Partnership, and Africa), striving to provide up-to-date situational awareness and enhanced analytical capabilities for the benefit of all partners’ border management authorities.
Given the success of the FRAN (EU-level Risk Analysis Network), Frontex has also rolled out the network approach to risk analysis for analytical work with many of its non-EU partner countries. Regional risk analysis networks provide an opportunity for continuous, structured and mutually beneficial sharing of information and knowledge between the EU and the participating countries.
The knowledge generated within the regional networks feeds into the planning / coordination of participants’ own border management activities, as well as higher level strategic work and EU-funded capacity building activities.
Regular data exchange, joint analytical activities and constant communications within the framework of the regional networks combines with other source monitoring to provide an analytical overview of the regional situations beyond the EU’s external borders, allowing contextualization of more operational exchanges of information and activities (e.g. bilateral case analysis and directed investigations).
In line with art. 29 par. 3 of Regulation (EU) 2019/1896, the Third Country Analysis Sector also hosts the development of the Frontex pre-warning mechanism, whose main goal is to increase preparedness to face future challenges related to irregular migration and cross-border crime throughout the four tiers of the EIBM, identifying and assessing possible threats, producing both predictive and forecasting analytics plus early warnings to support both operational and strategic planning.