African Arguments

Top Menu

  • About Us
    • Our philosophy
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

Main Menu

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Climate
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • Think African [Podcast]
    • #EndSARS
    • Into Africa [Podcast]
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Africa Science Focus [Podcast]
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Debating Ideas
  • About Us
    • Our philosophy
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

logo

African Arguments

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Climate
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • Think African [Podcast]
    • #EndSARS
    • Into Africa [Podcast]
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Africa Science Focus [Podcast]
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Debating Ideas
Africa Insiders
Home›African Arguments›Africa Insiders›Insiders Insight: It’s Belt and Road season

Insiders Insight: It’s Belt and Road season

By Africa Insiders
April 30, 2019
3262
0
President Cyril Ramaphosa hosts President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China on a State Visit to South Africa. Credit: GCIS.
President Cyril Ramaphosa hosts President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China on a State Visit to South Africa. Credit: GCIS.

President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa hosts President Xi Jinping of China on a state visit in 2018. Credit: GCIS.

African Arguments is and always will be freely-accessible to everyone.

But we also have a separate spin-off product called the Africa Insiders Newsletter. It consists of weekly emails with additional snappy insights on topics such as elections, conflict, health and more. It’s for those who want a bit extra and comes with a small subscription fee:

  • Regular: $10/month or $100/year
  • Patron: $15/month or $150/year. The extra 50% goes straight to funding African Arguments.
  • Student/limited income: $2/month or $20/year.

The profits from the newsletter go into funding African Arguments’ free content.

Click here to SUBSCRIBE.


Table of contents:

  • The follow-up
    • A tentative deal in Sudan
    • Second cyclone hits Mozambique in 6 weeks
  • What everyone is talking about
    • It’s Belt and Road season
  • What we are talking about
    • Ghana goes next level with world’s largest medical drone project
  • Health Corner
    • At long last, a malaria vaccine
  • Tweet of the week
    • Sir Milton, I presume?
  • What else?
    • If you have time, read these!

Click here to SUBSCRIBE.


Free segment: What everyone is talking about

It’s Belt and Road season

The essentials: China held its annual Belt and Road forum at the end of last week. While perhaps not everyone on the continent was talking about the event, elites certainly were as African nations try to balance desire for additional Chinese investments with concerns about mounting debt.

The context: China has used its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a development strategy, to drive investments on the African continent. Beijing’s promise of significant investments in infrastructure coupled with no human rights conditions has been appealing to some African leaders. But with payments mounting, those investments are no longer looking like such a good deal.

Leaders from Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Mozambique travelled to this year’s forum both to discuss new projects and revisit payments on old ones.

The good: Though there is some scepticism about what exactly China is attempting to accomplish with the BRI, there is no doubt that it has deepened ties between Beijing and capitals across the African continent. The Chinese now wield significant influence, which may be useful in myriad scenarios – from securing access to minerals to shipping rights to favourable votes at the United Nations.

And for African nations, it has unlocked capital to fund major infrastructural projects that would otherwise not have been available.

The bad: At the same time, there are concerns that it has locked those countries into a debt trap that it will be difficult to escape.

The future: China has shown some willingness to renegotiate loans. The question will be how aggressive African countries are in trying to revisit the terms of their borrowing and how much more debt they are willing to take on to keep the continental construction boom going.

  • China’s Belt and Road Forum: Does Africa need new funding options?(DW)
  • The Brookings Institute also has a take on African involvement in the Forum
  • Who will benefit from Africa’s Belt and Road Initiative? (Al Jazeera)

Discuss with @_andrew_green on Twitter

Click here to SUBSCRIBE.

The Africa Insiders’ Newsletter is a collaboration between AfricanArguments.org and @PeterDoerrie, with contributions from @_andrew_green and assistance from Stella Nantongo. Part of the subscription revenue is funding in-depth and freely accessible reporting and analysis on African Arguments.

Previous Article

What al-Bashir’s removal means for South Sudan’s ...

Next Article

From fashion to farming: Surviving and thriving ...

mm

Africa Insiders

The Africa Insiders Newsletter is a weekly newsletter brought to you by African Arguments. Written by leading journalists and analysts, it it made up of snappy, insightful updates on the major developments that have hit the week's headlines, and those that should've.

Leave a reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

  • Politics

    The LRA Back in the News

  • img-4
    Politics

    South Africa Risk Outlook: nationalisation to become a political football – By Robert Besseling, Senior Africa Forecaster Exclusive Analysis

  • Local women watching gorillas in natural habitat in Kahuzi-Biega National Park. Credit: Pole Pole Foundation.
    ClimateCongo-KinshasaEconomy

    Caring about conservation is not enough. We need to make it pay

Subscribe to our newsletter

Click here to subscribe to our free weekly newsletter and never miss a thing!

  • 81.7K+
    Followers

Find us on Facebook

Interactive Elections Map

Keep up to date with all the African elections.

Recent Posts

  • Djibouti fiddles amid the scramble for the Red Sea
  • Why France EACOP case might embolden, not discourage, activists
  • The International Community Must Reconsider its Engagement with Somaliland
  • Unpacking the geopolitics of Uganda’s anti-gay bill
  • Why’s the AfDB siding with the Agrochemical Industrial Complex?

Editor’s Picks

Editor's PicksEthiopiaPolitics

Four ways the Ethiopian government manipulates the media

From targeted harassment to blackouts, Addis Ababa has tried to dilute, distract and deflect from coverage of atrocities in the Tigray war.  Despite near universal condemnation and concern about atrocities ...
  • Rain clouds over a farming village near Iringa, Tanzania. Credit: UN Photo/Wolff

    “There isn’t any”: Tanzania’s land myth and the brave New Alliance

    By Tz
    May 15, 2018
  • img-8

    “What this generation wants”: African authors publishing direct to the web

    By Derick Matsengarwodzi
    April 1, 2021
  • Aderonke Ige at COP26 in Glasgow.

    We need a people-centred COP26. Instead, we have an elite marketplace

    By Aderonke Ige
    November 9, 2021
  • Asian-African

    It’s time to confront anti-Blackness in Asian-African communities

    By Sabrina Mahtani
    August 5, 2020

Brought to you by

img-11

Creative Commons

Creative Commons Licence
Articles on African Arguments are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
  • Cookies
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
© Copyright African Arguments 2020
By continuing to browse this site, you agree to our use of cookies.