China-EU partnership can speed Africa's development

Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Chinese President Xi Jinping. 

Photo credit: Alexey Nikolsky | Sputnik | AFP

Chinese leader Xi Jinping recently extended an invite to the European Union to work with China in solving some of the persistent challenges facing African countries.

In a virtual summit with leaders of France and Germany, Xi explained that by leveraging the combined capabilities of China and Europe, they could easily make tangible contributions to helping Africa overcome the double challenge of Covid-19 pandemic and hoist economic recovery in African countries.

President Xi comments sit well with the role of multilateralism in surmounting cross border challenges. Individually, both China and Europe have increasingly pivoted towards Africa in the last two decades. In the year 2000, the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) as well as the EU-Africa Summit were launched.

Since 2000, China has had more relative success in building the capacity of the African continent through a number of policy and practical cooperative arrangements. China is today Africa's largest trading partner, since 2009. Beijing is also ranking as a top contractor and development projects financier, with immense contribution to Africa's infrastructure modernization.

While the EU remains the top Foreign Direct investor in the continent, bureaucratic red tapes and policy inflexibility is holding its full potential to help Africa achieve set development objectives.

Yet there appears to be good momentum when individual EU country pees work with China in Africa. In 2019 for instance, the Kenya China Economic and Trade Association, British Chamber of Commerce Kenya, and Kenyan Private Sector Alliance signed an agreement to help Kenya operationalise special economic zones.

Chinese investors

The MoU has been hailed as an innovative approach to pool resources and extend technical and policy support to developing countries in building special economic zones and complete industrial chains.

Through the Sino-German Center for Sustainable Development, the Sustainable Textile Investment and Operation project in Ethiopia was launched in 2000, with the aim to improve environmental and labour standards in Ethiopia’s textile industry by bringing together Chinese investors and Ethiopian suppliers.

A 2019 report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development indicates that Africa and Latin America collectively account for less than five per cent of global data centers. To bridge these digital divides, Chinese enterprises have been working with a number of countries across the continent. Senegal recently launched a 70 million Euro data centre built by Huawei. The same company is in the process of helping Kenya put up a smart city and data center.

The partnership between French telecommunications firm, Orange and Huawei to help build Africa's telecommunications capability through deployment of 5G infrastructure is therefore a welcome move, setting precedent for additional cooperative avenues between Europe and China in the continent.

Poverty

Presently, the Covid-19 pandemic is the most serious threat to the socioeconomic and political sustainability of many African countries. More deadly variants are increasingly reported in many parts of the continent even as vaccination rates remain just above 1.5 per cent.  Both China and the EU are strong sources of vaccines that could help reduce the devastating impacts of the pandemic on the continent.

Africa's other major challenge is poverty. China has engineered innovative approaches to poverty alleviation that now ranks China as one of the most successful societies in defeating penury. Poverty has been a major trigger of thousands of Africans struggling to enter Europe and creating an immigration nightmare for the bloc. By working together, China and the EU can help Africa deal with the challenge of poverty.

In October 2020, the European Commission released five key areas namely green transition; digital transformation; sustainable growth and jobs; peace and governance; and migration and mobility that will form its engagement with Africa in the coming years.

Similarly, China and African countries are set to release new cooperative arrangements during the upcoming Focac Summit in Senegal.

China, EU and African counterparts should then engage in strategic discussions to formalize productive and sustainable development cooperation.