FOCAC Boosts New Industrialization Momentum for Africa

The 2024 summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) will be held in Beijing from Sept. 4 to 6, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying announced recently. Leaders from China and African countries will gather in China’s capital to further strengthen joint efforts in solidarity and cooperation.

Since its establishment in 2000, the FOCAC, a milestone in the development of Sino-Africa relations, has served as a platform and multilateral mechanism for effectively advancing collective consultation and expanding cooperation between China and African countries within a pragmatic framework.

The FOCAC is guided by five main objectives: promoting cooperation, enhancing understanding, ensuring equal consultation, expanding consensus and strengthening friendship. This has injected new impetus into long-standing China-Africa relations. Given all of this, China, the world’s largest developing country, and Africa, home to the greatest number of developing nations, have found common ground.

Faced with similar challenges in a world fraught with profound volatility, China and African countries have come together via mutual interests, with both reaping enormous benefits from their alliance via the FOCAC.

Organized triennially at the heads-of-state level with African and Chinese cities taking turns as host, the FOCAC summit is characterized by the release of a three-year joint action plan that not only advances respective development pathways of the two parties but also contributes to the building of a close-knit China-Africa community with a shared future.

For African countries, the FOCAC is a window of opportunity to attract more Chinese investments and to also tap into China’s vast experience and expertise in various fields. Since the establishment of the FOCAC, African countries have witnessed an influx of Chinese investments, a key source for the region’s industrial growth and an invaluable resource for the timely achievement of the African Union’s 2063 Agenda, the continent’s blueprint for industrial and economic development over the next 50 years.

Over the past 24 years, the FOCAC has been a springboard for a host of Chinese enterprises to expand their investments in Africa. During this period, Chinese enterprises have built industrial parks and economic zones all over Africa, contributing significantly to African countries’ industrialization and the continent’s “value-added” industrial potential. Recognized as a source of technology transfer, infrastructure financing as well as employment and skills transfer, Chinese-built industrial and economic zones provide a number of benefits including contributing to the expansion of Africa’s manufacturing production and exports, the growth of local innovation and the further enhancement of the region’s integration into global value chains.

The Zambia-China Economic and Trade Cooperation Zone, China’s first overseas economic and trade cooperation zone in Africa, was established in 2007. Since its opening, the multi-functional economic zone has made steady progress, contributing significantly to Zambia’s drive for industrialization. Data from China Nonferrous Metal Mining Group Co., Ltd. (CNMC), the company behind the Zambia-China Economic and Trade Cooperation Zone, shows that the zone has created more than 10,000 local jobs and has attracted nearly 100 businesses in various sectors including agriculture and manufacturing, mining, engineering equipment assembly and banking, with total investments surpassing $2.5 billion.

For Africa, the flow of Chinese foreign direct investment is crucial in transforming and upgrading the continent’s traditional sectors and fostering emerging industries, as it is an important source of infrastructure financing, technology transfer, skills transfer and an indispensable source for injecting new momentum for industrialization. For example, Africa has abundant natural resources such as vast mineral deposits and 65% of the world’s arable land yet has minimal capacities to harness natural resources for sustainable development.

But, over the last two decades, the surge in Chinese FDI flow has increasingly provided countries in the region with the opportunity to chart new development pathways that seek to balance productivity growth, job creation and ecological conservation, which are the bedrock of sustainable economic growth. Data released by China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University shows that annual Chinese FDI flows to Africa have been increasing steadily since 2003 – rising from $75 million in 2003 to $5 billion in 2021. The data also shows that since 2013 Chinese FDI flows to Africa have exceeded those coming from the United States.

Through the FOCAC, China has played a critical role in accelerating Africa’s industrialization and development. For example, to address Africa’s huge infrastructure gap, an impediment to the industrialization process, China has made unparalleled contributions by working with relevant stakeholders who seek to bridge the continent’s infrastructure financing gap. A policy paper from the Center for Global Development, a U.S.-based think tank, shows that between 2007 and 2020 China’s two main development finance institutions (DFIs), China Exim Bank and China Development Bank, invested $23 billion in infrastructure projects across Africa. For a 13-year period, infrastructure investments made by these two Chinese DFIs have been $8 billion more than the combined investments attributed to the top eight lenders, including U.S. and European development banks, the World Bank and the African Development Bank.

Funds from Chinese DFIs, typically concentrated in energy and transport infrastructure projects, have contributed significantly in laying a solid foundation for sustainable industrialization in Africa. According to the Infrastructure Consortium for Africa (ICA), Chinese investments in Africa’s information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure passed $1 billion in 2015. Thanks to the massive and continued investments from Chinese enterprises into the region’s ICT sector, Africa’s sustainable industrialization pursuit is yielding concrete results.

In Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, a GSMA report (2024) shows that the mobile sector accounted for 13.5% of total GDP in 2023, including the direct value added by wider ICT industries and the mobile sector’s impact in enhancing the productivity of other sectors. Digital transformation is not peculiar to a few African countries. In 2022, mobile technologies and services generated 8.1% of GDP across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) that amounted to approximately $170 billion of economic value added, supporting around 3.5 million jobs in the region. Mobile technologies’ contribution to the SSA’s economy is expected to reach $210 billion by 2030.

At the upcoming 2024 FOCAC summit, it is projected that new opportunities for enhanced cooperation in key areas, such as ICT, renewable energy, trade and transport will be mapped out, with these future channels crucial for Africa’s further industrialization and green development.

Alexander Ayertey Odonkor is a global economist with keen interest in the social, environmental and economic landscape of developed countries, emerging markets and developing economies particularly in Asia-Pacific, Africa, Europe and North America.