Category: Aid

While much of the news coverage in the immediate aftermath of this year's FOCAC focused on the premature calculation that China had reduced its financial pledge by a third, now, a week later, more nuanced analysis from some of the world's leading specialists in the field is ...

Researchers and analysts are beginning to work their way through the 40-page Dakar Action Plan that provides more detail on the outcomes of last week's FOCAC. If past FOCAC events are any guide, it's likely that it will take at least two to three weeks to fully ...

Chinese President Xi Jinping's pledge to reallocate $10 billion to African countries of its estimated $40 billion of Special Drawing Rights (SDR) that it received from the International Monetary Fund took some by surprise as being a bit, well, cheap.  "What ...

As the 8th Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) conference in Dakar nears, expectations in some quarters are rising that China will once again play the role of financier for African development and COVID-19 mitigation. At the previous two FOCAC summits, China ...

At a glance, Saturday's announcement that China would provide a $23 million grant to The Gambia for unspecified "economic and technical cooperation" (that's often diplomatic speak for unrestricted aid) doesn't seem remarkable at all. Ambassador Ma Jianchun ...

Chinese ambassador to the DRC Zhu Jing and Foreign Affairs Minister Christophe Lutundula Apala posed for a ceremonial fist-bump at the Foreign Ministry in Kinshasa following the signing earlier this month of three new accords that will provide additional Chinese aid to the DRC while eliminating some of ...

Once a holdout on the COVID-19 vaccination front, Burundi is now accepting vaccine donations from countries around the world, including China. A batch of 500,000 doses of Sinopharm arrived last week in the economic hub of Bujumbura. The shipment, $3 million ...

The young African civil society activists who attended last week's France-Africa summit in Montpellier gave voice to the surging frustration over their countries' ties with France, and by extension other foreign powers. Among the key themes that emerged was the demand ...

For a continent of 1.2 billion people, the quantity of COVID-19 vaccines donated by China and other Global North countries remains shockingly low. Bear in mind that the vast majority of these donations are for two-shot vaccines, so the total number of people inoculated is around 25 million. 

A new Twitter account popped up recently, intended to provide updates on a new China Aid-funded vaccine warehouse now under construction in the Zimbabwe capital Harare. You can follow the progress of the new warehouse on Twitter at