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The Nested Tragedies of Kenya’s Standard Gauge Railway

Recently we've seen two new pieces of research on Kenya’s Standard Gauge Railway (SGR,) which make for fascinating – if depressing – reading. They show that the project was doomed from the start by corruption and bad dealing from ...

The Black Expat Experience in Hong Kong

African residents living in China today are either students or traders, according to widely-held perceptions. With more than 80,000 African students studying in China every year and tens of thousands of people from across the continent doing business in port cities ...

Reuters: Zambia Claims It’s Shared Chinese Loan Details With Bondholders, But Investors Say They’re Still in the Dark

The Zambian government, according to Reuters, says it's doing "everything possible" to avoid defaulting on billions of dollars of Eurobonds, including acceding to investor demands that it reveal the extent of its Chinese loan portfolio. “We’ve given all the information that needs to ...

No Excuses. China Exim Bank Rejects Uganda’s Appeal For Repayment Delay

Back in August, the Ugandan government asked the China Exim Bank for a repayment delay on the loans needed to build the $1.7 billion Karuma dam project. A week went by and the bank replied with a simple answer: no. The government had requested the repayment delay ...

Why Kenya’s Standard Gauge Railway Was Doomed From the Start

Kenya's new multi-billion dollar standard gauge railway (SGR) was destined to fail even before it launched, argued Kenyan legal scholar Luis Franceschi in a new opinion column in the Nation newspaper. Franceschi joins a growing number of analysts who have long asserted that ...

Analysis from Cobus van Staden

2026: Africa-China Relations in a World Shaped by North-South Geopolitics

When talking about Africa–China relations, one is always moving along a sliding scale. There are myriad interactions with Chinese entities that concern only individual African countries, segueing into trends affecting the whole continent and sliding further into global dynamics shaping the developing world, of which Africa is the heart.

The Africa-China relationship is its own thing, but Africa’s fate can’t easily be separated from factors affecting the wider Global South, ...

What the EU Can Learn From China’s Development Efforts in Africa

Legacy aid donors in the United States and Europe generally don't look to China for inspiration on poverty alleviation programs that their aid agencies implement in places like Africa. That's a big mistake according to Philani Mthembu, executive director at Institute for Global Dialogue in Johannesburg. Mthembu ...

China’s COVID Donations Go to 53, Not All 54 African Countries

Chinese diplomats and state-run media outlets used to highlight how COVID-19 donations were sent to all 54 African countries across the continent. Recently, though, both Xinhua and the likes of senior diplomat Wu Peng have ...