With U.S.-South Africa ties in the deep freeze, it was notable to see the sheer size of the U.S. delegation sent to this week’s Mining Indaba in Cape Town – one of the most prominent industry gatherings and one of the few where the Global South gets a prominent voice.
The Trump administration’s famous Afrophobia seems (momentarily at least) tempered by its greed for minerals. It is reportedly walking ...
Category: TICAD
Japan Hosts African Leaders for Development Conference
Japan hosted African leaders on Wednesday for a three-day development conference, offering itself as an alternative to China as the continent reels from a debt crisis exacerbated by Western aid cuts, conflict and climate change. Attendees at the Tokyo International Conference ...
There’s a Creeping Sense Last Week’s Japan’s Africa Summit Was Kind of Underwhelming
The post-mortems of last week's Tokyo International Conference on African Development are starting to come in and the reviews, at least from some in the Japanese media, are not very encouraging. One of Japan's main news agencies, Jiji, said the event ...
Japan Pledges $30 billion in Funding at Africa Summit
Japan will extend $30 billion in funding to aid African development. This is the major outcome of the eighth Tokyo International Conference on African Development, which took place in Tunisia this weekend. Speaking virtually, Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida pledged funding across several cooperation ...
China Hits Back at TICAD 8
Japanese officials may have tried to downplay their rivalry with China in Africa, but the response from Beijing put the inflamed relationship between the countries front and center. China’s state-owned Global Times sharply criticized the commitments announced at the TICAD 8 meeting in ...
African Development Bank Collaboration Reveals Overlaps Between Japan’s and China’s Goals
A key announcement at TICAD 8 was that Japan will provide $5 billion to the African Development Bank (AfDB) under the fifth phase of the Enhanced Private Sector Assistance for Africa initiative (EPSA) from 2023 to 2025. EPSA is a Japan-led multi-donor platform to ...
Analysis from Cobus van Staden
How Do TICAD and FOCAC Differ?
While TICAD and the Forum for China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) hone in on similar areas of cooperation (training, connectivity, infrastructure), their approaches differ in important ways. This article by Peter Fabricius for the South African think tank the Institute for Security Studies lays ...
TICAD: Japan’s Quiet Challenge to China’s Development Role in Africa
27 and 28 August will see the eighth Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) taking place in Tunisia. Japan’s TICAD predates China’s Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) and set the template for the continent’s interaction with Asian economic superpowers. However, TICAD is ...
Japanese PM Abe Was a Big Proponent of Engagement With Africa, What Happens Now That He’s Stepping Down?
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who announced last week that he will step down for health reasons, was an enthusiastic proponent of a robust African engagement strategy. In particular, the prime minister advocated for a trade-led foreign policy with Africa that was highlighted ...
At TICAD7, China is Invisible, but Ever-Present
There’s a real disconnect at TICAD7 this year. This gap isn’t between Japan and Africa. Rather it’s between the experience of being inside TICAD and how it’s represented in the media. The dominant outside narrative is that TICAD is all about China – in
Why Using a Zero-Sum Analysis to Compare Japan and China in Africa “doesn’t work”
With the Tokyo International Conference on African Development or TICAD, summit coming up this week in Yokohama, there is often a temptation to compare Tokyo's engagement strategy in Africa with that of Beijing's. Furthermore, there are often references to how the Sino-Japanese rivalry in Asia also tends ...
China-Africa 101: Japan & China – Asian Players Competing on the African Continent
During the 2016 TICAD summit, Japan appeared to woo its African counterparts by emphasizing what China has long been criticized for: shoddy quality of projects. Speaking with African heads-of-state in Nairobi, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe did not name China but certainly alluded to the issue of ...
Japan Starts to Push the “High Quality” Line to Differentiate Its Infrastructure in Africa from China’s
With the 7th Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) coming up in two weeks, the pre-summit messaging coming from the Japanese government indicates that it plans to use this event to highlight the differences its approach to infrastructure development on the continent from that of the ...