Category: Development

One of the central issues in the current Zambian debt crisis is a lack of transparency that makes it largely impossible for investors, policymakers, and constituents on all sides to know what's really going on. The Chinese government and creditors are among the worst in this regard. ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Kenya is rapidly becoming the next flashpoint in the Africa debt crisis amid a dramatic increase in borrowing that threatens to submerge the economy. The Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) warned on Friday that the country's ballooning debt is ...

Jack Ma, the founder and former CEO of Alibaba, is in trouble with the government at home. Big trouble. Last week, Chinese regulators pulled the plug at the very last minute on Alibaba's blockbuster $34 billion IPO of its financial unit Ant Group after Ma ...

After the Dubai-based ports operator DP World was effectively pushed out of Djibouti by China Merchants Port Holdings (CMPH), the Emiratis packed up and headed a few hundred kilometers down the coast to set up shop at the Port of Berbera in the self-declared ...

The Chinese embassy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo announced that construction had begun on an enormous new art and cultural center in the capital Kinshasa. Work on the enormous new facility had been delayed due to COVID-19.

Algeria's new Grand Mosque, the largest mosque in Africa, hosted its first public prayers yesterday -- 18 months after the China State Construction Engineering Corporation completed construction. The new mosque, known locally as the Djamaa El-Djazair, occupies ...

The WHO and the Tanzanian government have heralded a Chinese project to combat schistosomiasis in Pemba island, Zanzibar, which ran from 2016 until this year. Its successful implementation of good practices like broad-based cooperation and its flexible project design to accommodate local specificities might have received more ...

Earlier this month, the Nigerian opposition politician Peter Obi delivered the 60th Founder’s Day lecture at the University of Nigeria. In his talk he took a swipe at the incumbent government’s handling of the current economic crisis, saying that instead of taking loans from China, Nigeria ...