Category: Loans

Bad news keeps piling up for the multi-billion dollar Chinese-financed and constructed Standard Gauge Railway network, the centerpiece of President Uhuru Kenyatta's ambitious infrastructure development agenda. Ridership and cargo freight volumes are both coming in much lower than expected on several ...

The China Exim Bank will provide a $214 million concessional loan to Rwanda to build the 43.5mw Nyabarongo II  power plant in the southern Muhanga District, according to a report in industry news site Energy Voice. The deal also includes a substation and a 110 Kv ...

China, according to the prevailing "debt trap" narrative, is preying on vulnerable developing countries by loading them up with unsustainable amounts of debt that jeopardizes their sovereignty. When these countries inevitably default on the loans, according to the theory, China ...

Since the new year, Kenya has taken some rather bold steps to reduce its borrowing costs and ensure that new loans are "fairly priced." The Treasury is seeking to refinance large portions of its current debt that's priced at commercial rates into more affordable concessionary loans. Separately, ...

Swedish scholar Johanna Malm is one of the world's leading researchers on China-DR  Congo relations and now joins the growing number of experts who refute the still widely-held China "debt trap" narrative. In a recent interview published by the government-run Swedish Institute, Dr. Malm explained that there's ...

For several years now, as debt levels in a number of African countries have risen to alarming heights, Chinese and African officials have reportedly been looking for new ways to evolve the traditional resource-for-infrastructure (RFI) deals that critics on both sides of this relationship contend saddles African ...

The founding Dean of Strathmore Law School in Nairobi and a visiting scholar at Oxford University, Luis Franceschi, wrote a pair of compelling columns last month in the Daily Nation newspaper that serve as a kind of master class on the enormous legal and economic implications associated ...

Professor Deborah Brautigam, Director of the China-Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, published a new paper this month that explores the Chinese debt trap theory that is widely propagated by U.S. government officials and a common theme in international media coverage of Chinese engagement in Africa. ...

The growing influence of China in world politics has not gone unnoticed in Washington. In 2018, while presenting the U.S. national defense strategy, which set priorities for the Pentagon, then U.S. Defence Secretary Jim Mattis declared in very clear terms that the United States was entering ...

There are conflicting messages emerging about the potential risks associated with Africa's steadily rising debt levels. Yesterday, the IMF issued a new warning that the amount of debt that African governments now owe has doubled over the past years as borrowing from capital markets and bilateral lenders, ...

After I published the story yesterday on the evolution of China's Resource-for-Infrastructure deals in Africa and the emergence of new financing models, known as "Sino-Africa Swap" deals, I wanted to get some additional perspective to find out if this is something that's actually happening or if ...

Decades before China embarked on countless Resource-for-Infrastructure deals in Africa, Japan pioneered the model in China as far back as the 1970s. The rapidly industrializing Japanese economy needed oil Chinese oil, minerals and other raw materials and China, one of the poorest countries at the time and ...