China-Africa forum: Covid-19 vaccine deals tipped to be on the table
- Fresh financing could also be in the pipeline but Beijing is more cautious about debt distress, observers say
- Gathering faces some challenges, including the lack of coordination on key goals
According to Development Reimagined, a Beijing-based international development consultancy, “China is likely to announce more financing and new initiatives during the [meeting]”.
In a study released on November 12, the consultancy said that in previous forums, China had a pattern of making gradual commitments, piloting them and expanding specific goals. For instance, in 2006, Beijing pledged US$5 billion in financing, an amount that increased to US$60 billion by 2018. Beijing has also trained thousands of Africans, up from 10,000 in 2003 to 50,000 in 2018.
“There will be new initiatives, some of them will be financial and some of them non-financial,” Development Reimagined chief executive officer Hannah Ryder said.
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She also said there were compelling reasons to expect concessional financing from China to African countries to continue, including the strength of China’s economy compared with many other areas in the world due to early Covid-19 prevention measures.
“FOCAC has been very unique within Africa-plus-one summits for announcing new financing to Africa. Today, not only is finance necessary in the context of Covid-19 recovery, which the Chinese government has acknowledged, but infrastructure financing remains a major gap for African countries across the board,” Ryder said.
However, she cautioned that a specific sum might not be announced. “This is still up for discussion and negotiation as it has been for the last few FOCAC summits.”
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The two-day conference, which starts on November 29, is taking place in Dakar at the ministerial rather than the summit level due to Covid-19 concerns.
Ministers and senior representatives from China, the African Union and the 53 African countries with diplomatic relations with China are expected to attend the forum, which will be hosted by Senegalese Foreign Minister Aïssata Tall Sall.
Chinese officials have recently hinted at the likely outcomes from the Dakar meeting.
Wu Peng, director general of the Chinese foreign ministry’s African affairs department, has said that China will come up with ways to expedite exports of agricultural products from the continent to China, with details expected to be unveiled during the meeting.
He also tweeted that China and Africa would launch a series of measures to promote cooperation in e-commerce and “further discuss vaccine cooperation with African countries”.
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Lina Benabdallah, a specialist in China-Africa relations at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, said that in the aftermath of a deadly wave of the Delta variant of the coronavirus in Africa, the forum would be a chance to make gains on vaccines.
“The conditions are open for African government elites to negotiate better delivery deadlines of the Chinese vaccines, [and] more efficient capacity building programmes in public health, including the possibility of actually producing the vaccine locally instead of just ‘mounting’ the parts,” Benabdallah said.
In an article for the London School of Economics’ China Foresight Project, she said that “in all likelihood, [the meeting] will be an opportunity yet again for African leaders to not only negotiate with their Chinese counterparts but also to discuss African public health needs among themselves”.
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The Development Reimagined study said China considered Africa an important new market for Chinese products because of the continent’s potential growth, with the population projected to reach nearly 2.5 billion by 2050.
It was also a market in which Chinese players could often outdo other foreign competitors, the report said.
Development Reimagined said the main exports of African economies to China included minerals, metals, agricultural products, and crude oil. However, more recently, trade flows of agricultural products from several African countries to China had risen. These products included tea, coffee, avocados, chillies, oilseeds, oil meals and grains, and wine.
From the African perspective, Development Reimagined said China has been a source of loans for projects that often would not be financed by other bilateral partners and even many multilateral development banks.
Further, China is an important source of machinery and technology transfer for African countries. And China may well play a geopolitical role for African countries, such as at the United Nations.
But the forum faces some challenges, including the lack of coordination on key goals. The report said that since the establishment of FOCAC, there had not been enough initiatives from the African countries to coordinate the forum’s activities. There was also a lack of data to track and evaluate FOCAC outcomes.
