Shaking off poverty is the primary goal of the Sustainable Development Agenda of the United Nations, which focuses on addressing poverty in Africa. Today there are around 700 million people suffering from extreme poverty in the world, of which more than half live in sub-Saharan Africa. Sixteen of the 20 poorest countries in the world are in Africa. Western countries have long provided assistance and debt relief to African countries, but the number of extremely poor people in sub-Saharan Africa rose from 290 million in 1990 to 414 million in 2010. According to Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There is Another Way for Africa, assistance and debt relief show the “benevolence” of Western countries while failing to improve the ability of African countries to address poverty.

Similar to Africa, China once had a large number of poor people, mostly in rural areas, where construction of infrastructure including dams, irrigation and roads has greatly boosted incomes. China built about 42,000 kilometers of rural roads every year on average from 1994 to 2000, promoting the free flow of local agricultural products and surplus labor. Economic development zones attracted many labor-intensive industries, created a large number of employment opportunities and brought the demographic dividend into full play. Since reform and opening up, China has lifted more than 800 million people out of poverty. According to World Bank benchmarks, its poverty rate fell from 90 percent in 1981 to 1.7 percent in 2018, contributing to more than 70 percent of global poverty reduction.

China’s experience in poverty alleviation has attracted wide attention from the international community, including African countries. In 2016, the Afrobarometer released a survey on how Africans view China’s influence, which showed that its model for national development was acknowledged by 24 per cent of respondents. About two-third of Africans viewed China’s influence as “somewhat positive” or “very positive”. Against such a backdrop, the Belt and Road Initiative proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping has seen proactive support and participation of African countries. As of June 2020, a total of 43 African countries had signed cooperation agreements on the initiative.

The COVID-19 epidemic has led to big increases in prevention and control costs, and health expenditure of African countries. The countries are also trying to revive economic growth and ensuring employment to prevent local people from returning to poverty or becoming poorer. In light of this, Xi proposed at the Extraordinary China-Africa Summit on Solidarity against COVID-19 that China and Africa should “strengthen Belt and Road cooperation and accelerate the follow-up to the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation Beijing Summit. Greater priority needs to be given to cooperation on public health, economic reopening and people’s livelihood.”

The initiative can drive China-Africa cooperation on economic and trade financing, industrial transfer and technological exchanges and promote transformation and upgrading of cooperation.

Weak infrastructure is the largest hurdle to Africa’s development. Power shortages are problem in Africa, and a multinational which once donated thousands of laptop computers to African countries found that they could not be charged. With industrial enterprises depending on stable electricity supply, power shortages cause severe damage to industrialization in Africa. Meanwhile, African countries with weak railway transport depend largely on road transport, which makes intercity transport quite expensive. The lack of intercity transportation capacity has greatly restricted the production of local enterprises, with production volumes failing to reach the expected level. The fee collection modes of electronic communication devices in Africa also remain to be improved.

Improving African infrastructure has been the focus of China-Africa cooperation. In the 1960s and 1970s, even when China faced economic problems, it spent $450 million on building the 1,860-km Tanzania-Zambia railway. After that initiative, China paid great attention to the construction of railways, highways, aviation, ports, power and telecommunication in Africa and promoted inter-connectivity of different African regions. According to the US-based Brookings Institution, China’s average annual investment in infrastructure in Africa totaled about $10 billion, accounting for one-third of the total foreign funds. In October 2016, the railway from Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, to Djibouti opened to traffic. The railway connecting Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, and Mombasa, the largest port in East Africa, opened in May 2017. The railways are “flagship projects” under the initiative in Africa, which have allowed countries to see more sophisticated infrastructure including railways, roads and ports, creating a large number of jobs and driving investment in industrial zones, tourism and real estate along the railways. 

For a long time, Western media outlets have viewed China-Africa economic cooperation to be an exchange of infrastructure for natural resources through policy banks. From their perspective, China’s policy banks sign guarantee agreements with African countries and the latter use local natural resources to gain lower-interest loans and use the loans to build infrastructure, while China met its demand for resources and energy through the cooperation mode. Today, the financing options for China-Africa economic cooperation have greatly increased and the role of policy banks has weakened. Chinese state-owned and private enterprises have become major investors in Africa, in which the latter have turned key driving forces for economic cooperation.

In 2017, McKinsey released a research report entitled The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa, which detailed previously-ignored private investment from China. According to the research team, more than 10,000 Chinese companies operated in Africa in 2017, mainly in Nigeria, Zambia, Tanzania and Ethiopia. About one-third of the private enterprises were in the manufacturing industry and mostly small and micro enterprises. According to research findings of the Heritage Foundation, China’s investment in Africa has become diversified. In addition to conventional projects including mineral resources and infrastructure, Chinese investment has also gone into industries including real estate, banking, finance, insurance, logistics and retail. Since the implementation of the initiative, China’s contribution to Africa’s GDP growth has exceeded 5 per cent every year. In addition, many Chinese merchants and technicians who know Africa well have settled there and become key forces for driving sustainable development of the economy and trade as well as technology transfer in many fields.

As a people-centered philosophy, inclusive development entails balanced development between humans, humans and nature, as well as humans and society, and needs to be evaluated by multiple criteria including human development, green development, social welfare and happiness indexes. As Xi told the 24th Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Economic Leaders’ Meeting held in 2016, “the world needs to lead economic globalization and ensure justice and equity to make economic globalization more dynamic, inclusive and sustainable and enable people around the world to feel happier and more engaged and satisfied.”

At the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation held in May 2017, Xi further announced that China would provide 2 billion yuan ($292 million) of emergency food aid to developing countries along the route, increase funding to the South-South Cooperation Assistance Fund by $1 billion, and launch 100 “happy home” projects, 100 poverty alleviation projects and 100 healthcare and rehabilitation projects in countries along the route. While developed countries have reduced or suspended assistance to African countries, China and other developing countries support each other in solidarity, which helps address the urgent needs of developing regions such as Africa.

Inclusive development focuses on reducing poverty and promoting social equity. In addition to humanitarian assistance for meeting basic living needs of the poor, inclusive development is mostly achieved through trade, finance and technical training. Since 2015, China has provided Africa with 30,000 government scholarships and trained 200,000 technicians to help improve the quality of the local workforce. In 2019, the World Bank released the report Belt and Road Economics: Opportunities and Risks of Transport Corridors, proposing that the full implementation of the initiative can help 32 million people shake off moderate poverty and increase the trade volume of the global market and countries along the route by 6.2 per cent and 9.7 per cent respectively. The growth of foreign direct investment in developing countries along the route will reach 7.6 percent. Promoting inclusive trade, finance and education through improving the capacity of African countries for self-reliance can help enhance production capacity and promote industrialization and exportswhile avoiding long-term reliance on foreign assistance.

As Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, said when setting up the Commission for Africa in 2004, Africa has always appeared to be a desolate land. “I have said on many occasions that I believe Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world.”

However, it has 40 percent of the world’s natural resource reserves, 60 percent of uncultivated land and a billion-strong growing labor force. There is no reason for Africa to remain poor for Africans can create wealth through their own efforts. As the initiative and the summit on China-Africa cooperation against the COVID-19 suggest, Africa needs not sympathy and assistance but global solidarity and cooperation.

The author is an assistant research fellow of the Institute of World Economics and Politics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

The author contributed this article to China Watch exclusively. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of China Watch.

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