For years, China has been seen as the pivotal international economic partner across Africa. That was certainly true in terms of steadily rising trade volumes and a fire hose of state backed loans that built roads, railways, and ports across the continent.
But when it comes to investment, China’s always been a laggard behind the United States and the former European colonial powers. Today, it’s the UAE, not China, that is the continent’s largest source of foreign direct investment.
Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C., joins Eric to discuss his latest report on Chinese FDI in Africa and why the long-promised wave of manufacturing investment never materialized.
Show Notes:
- Center for Global Development: China’s Investment Pivot and Africa’s Industrial Prospects: Any Hope for African “Flying Geese”? by Charles Kenny
- Boston University Global Development Policy Center: Chinese Investment in Africa: A Double-Edged Sword for Low-carbon Industrialization by Keyi Tang, Solomon Owusu, and Gideon Ndubuisi
- Hinrich Foundation: How much of China’s investment into Africa is real? by Stewart Paterson
About Charles Kenny:
Charles Kenny is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. His current work focuses on global economic prospects, gender and development, and development finance. He is the author of the books “The Plague Cycle: The Unending War Between Humanity and Infectious Disease,” “Getting Better: Why Global Development is Succeeding,” “The Upside of Down: Why the Rise of the Rest is Good for the West,” and “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility: Happiness in Philosophical and Economic Thought.” He has been a contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine and a regular contributor to Business Week magazine. Kenny was previously at the World Bank, where his assignments included coordinating work on governance and anticorruption in infrastructure and natural resources, and managing a number of investment and technical assistance projects covering telecommunications and the Internet.
Transcript:
ERIC OLANDER: Hello, and welcome to another edition of the China in Africa podcast, a proud member of the Sinica Podcast Network. I’m Eric Olander. Unfortunately, my usual co-hosts, Cobus van Staden and Geraud Neema, are both away at conferences this week and can’t join us.
So it’ll just be me manning the controls today. But we’ve got a fantastic show. We’re going to focus on Chinese investment trends in Africa.
But before we get to investment trends, I think it’s important that we talk about trade. And it’s been a big week for trade data coming out of the China-Africa space. So the Chinese Ministry, or the Chinese General Administration of Customs, I should say, released their new trade figures for the first five months of the year, January through May.
And overall, trade was up 2.5 percent, relatively small because of the downturn in U.S.-China trade. Two notable exceptions, though, were a big increase in two-way trade between Southeast Asia, up 14.8 percent in those five months compared to the same period last year, and 12.4 percent with China-Africa trade. Now, a lot of that trade is coming in the form of exports from China to Africa and not a lot in the form of imports from Africa to China.
And nonetheless, the numbers are moving higher. We also got some news this week on the trade front from Changsha, China, which is a central Chinese city, the capital of Hunan province, where there was a convening of a ministerial coordinating committee for the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation. This was the FOCAC event that took place last year.
And they got together in Changsha this week to update on the outcomes and to make sure that they’re living towards the outcomes and working towards those outcomes. And some big news came out of it that China announced that it would grant tariff-free access to 53 African countries to the Chinese market. Now, again, this sounds like a big deal, but bear in mind that already 33 African countries, lesser-developed African countries, had free trade access into the Chinese market.
So we’re adding 20 more countries to that list. Notice that I didn’t say 54 countries. That’s because Eswatini is not included in this, and it’s one of the benefits that other African countries that recognize China and not Taiwan get.
But let’s talk today about investment. And there was a new report that came out from the Center for Global Development, China’s Investment Pivot in Africa’s Industrial Prospects, Any Hope for African Flying Geese, written by Charles Kenny, who’s a senior fellow at CGD, and joins us today from a rather dark basement somewhere in Maryland in the United States. A very good morning to you, Charles.
CHARLES KENNY: Good morning.
ERIC OLANDER: Congratulations on the report. It’s a timely report when we talk about Chinese investment in Africa. You say that the report examines how Chinese investment in Africa is changing and, you know, it’s evolving from large-scale infrastructure, which we should note isn’t really investment because a lot of that was debt financed.
But small-scale manufacturing now is a big focus for African countries seeking to lure more Chinese investment on the continent. Tell us a little bit about the key findings of your report and the overview and this transformation that you’re talking about.
CHARLES KENNY: I began researching the report hoping to tell an exciting positive story about how China was moving towards being a high-income country. It had a policy of wanting to move from basic manufacturing, like manufacturing overseas. Africa has some of the cheapest labor in the world and was an obvious potential location for a lot of that manufacturing support.
There was already an existing China-Africa relationship built around Belt and Road and so on. There were some signs of China moving manufacturing onto the continent, especially in Ethiopia. And maybe this could be a win for Chinese investors, a win for African export-led growth through manufacturing.
While I think all of that is true, I finished writing the report feeling that there were a lot of barriers, an increasing number of barriers, in the way of thinking that this was going to be a really big opportunity for Africa, or at least for many African countries. I still think there’s a role for it, but current circumstances, not least, around global trade suggest that maybe the opportunity isn’t as big as at least I’d hoped.
ERIC OLANDER: Right. I’ve been in the China-Africa space now for 15 years. And going all the way back to 2010, when I first started looking at this issue, there was all this anticipation that the offshoring of Chinese manufacturing, as wages in China went up, as environmental regulations went up, as the cost of business in China just went up as part of the maturing economy there, that Africa would be a beneficiary because, as you pointed out, the low cost and surplus of labor, a big domestic market in many African countries. And in the 15 years that I’ve been looking at this and that we at CGSP have been looking at this, we’ve kind of come to the same conclusion that you have, that it’s just not there.
That being said, there is quite a bit of Chinese investment coming into the continent to serve local markets. So, for example, porcelain and flip-flops, and even building cars and even phones and assembling phones for the local market. They’re just not, you know, setting up big manufacturing exports operations like they are here in Southeast Asia that then export back to China or to the rest of the world.
Did you find that same distinction in your research?
CHARLES KENNY: Absolutely. And it seems like the Chinese investment in manufacturing for the local market is, you know, improving the productivity of manufacturing on the continent. It’s far from a completely dire picture.
There’s also, now China’s been investing a lot in cement manufacturing in the region, which is great. There are one or two examples of China investing in processing of raw materials, things like lithium in Zimbabwe and so on. So there is stuff going on and that’s great.
It’s just not at the scale that I might have hoped. And the flying geese referenced in the title to the paper is around the idea that, you know, in Japan and then South Korea and then a bunch of other countries, including China itself, we saw this pattern of manufacturing export-led growth at a really quite large scale, which sort of spread across countries as Japan became too wealthy to follow that strategy. Japanese investors helped South Korea follow it, you know, and so on and so forth onto China.
And it doesn’t look like there are going to be a whole bunch of African geese joining that pattern necessarily. And that’s partially about global trends, right? As you say, there’s no sign yet that China is actually giving up a lot of manufacturing output, even in rather apparel and footwear and so on.
It’s still got about, you know, a third of the, I think, the global export market. And that’s partially because even though these industries still remain comparatively labor-intensive, you know, they are getting more productive through the use of more technology, more capital. And so sort of China can hold on to some of that production, even with higher labor costs.
And that’s part of the global picture. You know, we’ve passed peak manufacturing employment worldwide. There are just fewer manufacturing jobs than there used to be.
The richest consumers in places like the States and Europe increasingly consuming services, not manufacturers. And manufacturing productivity continues to increase. And that combination just sort of inevitably means, pardon me, fewer jobs worldwide in manufacturing.
So it’s not just a sort of China-Africa story. It’s a global story.
ERIC OLANDER: It’s a broader development story. And that really challenges the pathway that a lot of people understand of how countries develop. And so here, again, in Asia, this has been the example.
And in other parts of the world as well, where a country will move from an agrarian-based economy and then start bringing in light manufacturing, eventually start to move up the value chain to bring in heavier manufacturing, to the point where they then evolve into services. And at that point, they start to move out of being a lower income to a middle income, and eventually to follow the Singapore, the Japan, Korea, and become an advanced economy. Malaysia is the closest now to being able to do that.
My colleague, Kobus Van Staden, makes the point, though, that because of both China and automation, that that pathway is no longer viable for most countries. Because as you pointed out, we’re at peak manufacturing. So where are the jobs going to come from for Nigeria, for Ethiopia, for Kenya, if automation, China, and other markets are competing for these jobs, and there’s just not going to be a lot of that development?
What does a country like that do if they’re not going to manufacture products that will then help them move along that journey towards an advanced economy objective?
CHARLES KENNY: I think you raise a fair point. I don’t want to go too far the other way. But certainly, you know, there’s been all this discussion about the China shock in the US, and you can argue how big it was, whether it actually existed, so on, whether it had a net effect on jobs or any on jobs in certain areas, so on.
I think that sort of the bigger and unseen China shock, if you will, is that China occupied a lot of space in manufacturing that maybe would have been occupied by other countries had China not occupied it. And so maybe we would have seen faster growth elsewhere. That said, we would have seen slower growth in China.
And China has been a massive global miracle in reducing poverty. So, you know, six of one half dozen of the other. But moving forward, I think you’re right, the path has got narrower, and will probably continue to get narrower to follow manufacturing led, especially the sort of the model through light manufacturing.
I don’t think it’s gone away. And I don’t think we should sort of give up on it. But it’s got narrow, right.
And so having a plan B and a plan C is probably a really good idea. A plan B might be to try and move sort of straight into the heavier end of industry, sort of leapfrogging, if you will, the light end. That’s got, frankly, a mixed record worldwide, including in Africa.
I mean, China did it a bit itself after the great leap forward, and it wasn’t economically or socially exactly a pleasant experience. Nigeria, amongst others, has, you know, tried moving into steel with very mixed success and a lot of spending. So it’s not an easy path.
But I think, you know, perhaps with greater involvement of players, including China that have expertise in how to effectively run large processing of raw materials, that might be part of an additional path. And frankly, the other thing I point to is global demographic change. Most rich countries and by rich countries, I mean, upper middle income and high income countries, so including China, but even more so Europe and the United States are on the edge of a demographic cliff or already falling off it.
So the number of working age people in the country is not only dropping in a relative sense, it’s not only dropping compared to the population as a whole. In an absolute sense, it’s dropping. There are going to be fewer workers in most European countries here on out without the impact of migration, which I think does speak to another potential path for especially African countries to instead of trying to export manufacturers, export workers and rely more heavily on a migration-led model of growth.
ERIC OLANDER: But I mean, I’m just a little surprised to hear that because the politics today in the United States, where we literally are putting the soldiers on the streets to hunt down immigrants, and at the same time in Europe, the politics are quite toxic around migration, doesn’t seem like either one of these places, despite their demographic challenges, want a lot of black and brown people from Africa to come into their communities and to do work. And at the same time, we’ve seen this in Asia as well, where Japan has suffered prolonged anemic growth and was told for a long time that they needed to bring in immigrants to offset the demographic downturn.
Same with China, but they don’t want to bring in immigrants any more than Donald Trump does. So it doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of mobility opportunities for African, young Africans looking for jobs in G20 countries.
CHARLES KENNY: The funny thing is, I mean, I agree the politics and certainly the politics that gets reported is indeed highly toxic. If you look at the reality, you know, what’s sort of actually happening, we are seeing larger migrant flows. And so, you know, countries like Germany, for example, are actively reaching out to Kenya and signing labor mobility agreements and so on.
We’re seeing a lot more labor mobility agreements signed worldwide. Japan is sort of desperately looking for more workers and is trying to ease visa requirements. South Korea, the same.
And so, while sort of the headlines are indeed ugly, and I’m not saying there isn’t a reaction there, there is indeed a strong populist reaction in many places. So the reality we are actually seeing in terms of numbers and policies looks a bit different. You know, even in countries like Italy that elected people on really quite strong anti-migrant platforms, even they, if you look at the policies and the numbers, the story is definitely at least a lot more nuanced.
And other countries are, you know, going even further. An example I like to say is that the mayor of Helsinki in Finland said the official language of Helsinki would become English in order to make it easier for migrants to come. We’re actually seeing a whole bunch of policy changes that look very different from what you’d imagine, given the toxic rhetoric.
ERIC OLANDER:] Yeah, I mean, you don’t see that in the headlines, that’s for sure. Let’s go back to this China investment in Africa, and you talked about heavy industry and leapfrogging. You mentioned critical resource mineral processing, and that’s something, by the way, that our CGSP critical minerals editor, myself, Obert Bore, we recorded a half-hour show on this on our YouTube channel exploring the challenges facing African countries in moving up the critical mineral value chain.
And one of the big issues is that in order to process resources, you need a combination of basically at least three things. You need lots of electricity, you need lots of water, and you need highly skilled people to be able to run these factories and to build these factories. Now, Zimbabwe has started very low-end processing at Prospect Lithium, is one of the Chinese-backed mines.
The Chinese just signed deals in Nigeria for $800 million to do, again, this first stage of processing. But the problem is that in most African countries, you either have a lot of water, like in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but you don’t have a lot of electricity there. Or you’re in Kenya or Botswana and you have a lot of electricity, but you don’t have a lot of water.
Same in Zimbabwe. So how, if you talk about in your paper that they’re supposed to try and maybe leapfrog, or that’s an opportunity, without the access to water and the infrastructure to do that, is that realistic?
CHARLES KENNY: I mean, I’d add you need a lot of sort of energy beyond the electricity. A lot of these processes are energy-intensive and sort of in the very production. And so you need the carbon anodes to do the aluminium smelting and so on.
I mean, there’s a fair amount of non-electricity energy required as well. And I think that’s an absolutely fair point. One of the things that paper discusses is if you ask manufacturing firms in Africa what’s the biggest barrier they face, electricity comes near the top.
Reliable electricity just is a problem across much of the region. And firms end up using generators, but that’s massively expensive. And so I think that is a real barrier.
There was a time when China was investing reasonably heavily in large electricity projects in the region. Again, that time sadly is a bit past. The new sort of small as beautiful BRI is not doing those big energy projects.
It’s still doing small-scale solar.
ERIC OLANDER: Well, they’re doing green energy on a smaller scale, but it’s not the big hydrocarbon and dams that we were seeing for a long time.
CHARLES KENNY: And for the kind of processes you’re talking about, you can’t just run them off solar power. You need those bigger electricity projects to do it. So you make a completely fair point.
And it’s, again, it’s one of the reasons I started this paper more altruistic than I finished it.
ERIC OLANDER: No, I mean, I think the paper is important because it raises the challenges that are out there. And people, what frustrates me is that I’ll go to one conference after another, and people will just casually throw off that African countries have to get more value out of their raw materials, which I think everybody would agree on. And then they say, well, there needs to be beneficiation, which is the processing and moving up the value chain.
And that’s where the conversation stops. And then there is not the, well, how do we do that? That’s issue number one.
Issue number two is that to process minerals in any meaningful way beyond the base level would put you directly in competition with the Chinese themselves. And so the Chinese have a very strong grasp over many of the critical mineral processing industries. And they may want to offshore some of it, but they’re not going to offshore a substantial amount of it.
Or they may offshore, again, the first two or three levels of processing. Many of these minerals have to go through 17, 18, 19 levels of processing before they’re actually refined. So they may offshore the base level, which is not very profitable.
The real profit comes in the high-end manufacturing of this. And the Chinese have looked at this as a strategic objective. I mean, you’ve just seen in the latest confrontation with the United States that they use their control as real leverage over Donald Trump to force him to make concessions in the trade talks.
And I just don’t see them giving that up in any meaningful way.
CHARLES KENNY: And also, the further up the processing you get, the more the issue you’re talking about of sort of the human capital requirements, the skills and so on, becomes binding. So, yeah, I certainly wouldn’t imagine it anytime soon. It’s another reason for thinking that, gosh, wouldn’t it be nice if there was another set of investment partners out there for Africa to rely on on some of the stuff that it’s not getting from China?
ERIC OLANDER: It’s funny you say that, because what we’ve heard just this year is that the United Arab Emirates has now emerged as the largest foreign direct investor in Africa. So, so far, there’s been $110 billion worth of projects between 2019 and 2023 announced by the Emiratis. By the way, the Saudis are now coming in in quite a substantial way, along with the people from Kazakhstan and others.
Let me just remind everybody that a lot of people mistakenly think that China is the number one investor in Africa, because they see the loans and they see the trade, which is very different than investment. And again, there’s many ways of counting this, but according to Ernst & Young’s annual attractiveness survey, which many people regard as the benchmark in measuring this, the Netherlands is now number one with, again, the UAE as well, France, the US, the United Kingdom, and China comes in fifth. And I think that’s something that’s a big surprise to a lot of people, that China is actually not a major investor in Africa.
There’s a lot of loans, and it does a lot of trade, and it does a lot of financing, but investment is a very different thing. Did that come up in your research, where China fit in this ranking? And by the way, I should say that there’s many different ways to tabulate this.
UNCTAD, the UN Trade and, I forget what they call it, but what that acronym stands for, but UNCTAD rates those as the five, but then you look at E&Y, they rate it differently. So it’s a very complicated way of ranking it. But nonetheless, everybody kind of agrees that the traditional colonial powers in the United States tend to be the largest investors in terms of measuring FDI stock.
Did you come across that in your research?
CHARLES KENNY: Yeah. I mean, I, for example, count lending as investment. So I guess it depends a bit on your definitions.
ERIC OLANDER: Well, I mean, you count, I guess my definition on investment is where’s the risk? And the sense is that by an investment, you actually put in and you can lose this money. The way that the Chinese have set up their loans, in many ways, they don’t lose because they’ve got collateral accounts and they’ve got escrow accounts and they’ve got all sorts of different things that offset the risk.
CHARLES KENNY: I think some of the people holding the Chinese loans might disagree with you that they’re risk free. But anyway, to your point, FDI is definitely different. And when you look at FDI, not only is China not a particularly large player, it seems to have plateaued as a player in Africa.
The numbers aren’t shooting up. I would say sort of go back to the other stuff, including the lending. I think a real barrier to more FDI in the region is that a lot of the public infrastructure you need isn’t there.
I mean, you know, coming back to sort of electricity transmission lines, well, ports, you can now sometimes do private. And that’s one of the places, obviously, that UAE is an active player. But a lot of this is sort of public infrastructure questions.
And so it’s actually, I mean, it is about, if you will, the broader kind of investment as a backdrop to getting in more FDI. But I take your point when it comes to FDI in particular, China hasn’t been a big player. And indeed, as you say, sort of that disappoints me because I think it does have a lot of the kind of talent that comes along with FDI that Africa needs in order to break into new industries.
ERIC OLANDER: And it’s a real sharp contrast between what’s happening here in Southeast Asia, where huge flows of Chinese FDIs pouring into Vietnam, pouring into Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore as well. Just massive quantities of money are flowing there, but not so much flowing into Africa. You talk about one country in particular that has been an exception.
You call it the Ethiopian exception. Why is Ethiopia different?
CHARLES KENNY: Ethiopia was different. Was different. Okay.
Why was Ethiopia different? Yeah. Because it really was managing to create a manufacturing export industry in particular in apparel and other parts of light manufacturing, footwear and so on.
It did that in part off the back of Chinese investment, not just FDI individual factories, but also the Djibouti port that a lot of Ethiopian manufacturing goes out of was bought by China as a transmission lines to bring the electricity to the manufacturing. And some of the electricity production was all partly financed by China. But a bunch of other firms came in too, H&M, other Western firms.
Ethiopia has some of the poorest people on the planet. So not surprisingly also has some of the lowest wages. H&M was paying some of its workers, I think $36 a month.
And you sort of put that together with reasonably decent infrastructure, reasonably sort of efficient, comparatively efficient institutions, and it seemed to be working. One other really important element though was that a lot of those exports were going to the United States. And the US at the time had, still on the books, AGOA, this preferential trade access for African countries, particularly in sectors like light manufacturing.
And so you had the combination of reasonably efficient production and a tariff advantage. And put the two together and you saw Ethiopia really doing quite well, you know, hundreds of thousands of jobs created. Then the war happened and the AGOA advantages were taken away.
Ethiopia was no longer AGOA eligible. And that alone was enough to stall and indeed sort of reverse the progress Ethiopia had been making. And now we seem to be basically in a sort of post-AGOA period in all but name in the recent US administration moves on tariffs, although, you know, it’s hard to keep up.
There is no tariff advantage particularly.
ERIC OLANDER: I mean, if you’re a betting person, which I’m not, but if I was, you know, I don’t think that AGOA is going to get renewed in this current environment. It seems hard to believe.
CHARLES KENNY: Right. I mean, and if you look at one of the other countries that did rather well under AGOA, which is Lesotho, also started up for Lesotho quite a large manufacturing base exporting to the United States. I think it still faces a threat of 40% tariff.
Yeah.
ERIC OLANDER: One of the highest in the world. I mean, he’s got a thing for Lesotho.
CHARLES KENNY: And sort of the effective tariff at the moment on US footwear is somewhere in the 68%, sorry, would be somewhere in the 68% region. If we go back to the tariffs that were announced originally, we’re still not quite there yet. But anyway, so the effective tariffs on the very sectors where manufacturing exports tend to start in low-income countries, those are the very sectors with the highest effective tariffs under the administration’s regime.
So, you know, it doesn’t give you too much optimism. And I also accept your point that even though China has made this change towards duty-free access, sorry, tariff-free access to goods, you know, we wait to see how much of the Chinese market is actually open to exports from Africa rather than local production, where China is still very big.
ERIC OLANDER: And I wrote about this today for our subscribers, which is number one, what is Africa going to sell that China needs? Africa is not going to be a major food exporter because Africa imports about $50 billion worth of food every year. So there’s a both a moral dimension and a practical dimension that Africa for the most part is made up of smallholder farms, does not produce industrial scale agriculture like Brazil, Russia, Europe, even the United States does that China needs at just a volume and scale.
We talked about manufacturing, Africa is not going to sell manufactured goods to China. Most likely what Africa is going to sell is extractives and a lot more extractives. That’s not necessarily very healthy for a lot of these economies and a lot of these societies.
One issue on trade though, which is very interesting, I’d be interested to get your take on this is that tariffs are certainly important and they’re one part of it, but there’s a lot of non-tariff issues that also have to be taken into account. So the problem that Kenya had for a long time in selling avocados to China was that China had very high sanitary standards to prevent pests from coming in, which is understandable. So they required flash freezing on site.
That equipment and that skill was very, very difficult. So they approved for the avocados to come through, no problem for the fruit to make it over, tariffs were taken away, green lanes were set up, but yet you had this non-tariff barrier that prevented, were delayed. Eventually they got it going, but it gives an example of some of the difficulties of doing trade between these different economies.
CHARLES KENNY: Absolutely. And I mean, you know, we see it with Europe too, with the fighting sanitary. I mean, worldwide, the non-tariff barriers are clearly the bigger barriers to trade relationships than tariff barriers, or at least were until recently.
ERIC OLANDER: Well, yeah. I mean, we don’t know what’s going to happen now. We don’t know what’s going to happen now, but okay.
So you did this report. I’m just curious what you want people to take away from the report. What’s the key message that you think right now in 2025 with Trump’s tariffs issues underway, with the new free trade proposals from China, what do you want people to take away from your report regarding Chinese investment in Africa and the trends?
CHARLES KENNY: I wish I had a clear answer to that.
ERIC OLANDER: I mean, it’s not easy right now. I understand that.
CHARLES KENNY: Yeah. And I mean, I feel there are still some opportunities. We’ve spent a lot of time pointing out the limits to those opportunities, you know, grasp the opportunities to the extent they are available, I guess, is what I would say, but have a plan B.
ERIC OLANDER: And what would you say those are, though? Because again, we’ve talked about the difficulty for mineral processing and heavy industry, but where do you think the opportunities are for most African countries?
CHARLES KENNY: There is still sort of the basic end of mineral processing, which is the obvious place to start anyway. So yeah, I think there is still that there is, as you were saying, a lot of Chinese investment is about the local market. And I think it’s great that we’re seeing more cement manufacturer in Africa.
So great. I think there are still opportunities, hopefully, in light manufacturing as well. For some countries, the C2 included, I guess, if I was an investor, now’s not the moment I’d be making a big bet on moving my factories anywhere.
I’d want to wait until the situation calms down. But dealing with some of the issues that would prevent it even in a more calm time would be great. So thinking about how do I make my electricity system more stable?
You know, frankly, you need that for everything, right? You need that for local production, for manufacturing export, to get your services industry working better. So fixing that seems a no brainer to any approach, if you will.
So I do think there are there are opportunities still to be grasped sort of in that manufacturing space and in the broader industrial space. I would be looking for plan B and C. I think that includes greater regional integration.
I think it does include thinking more about services exports and the movement of people. So, you know, thinking about a range of strategies in uncertain times, having a portfolio is a good idea, right? You benefit most from having a portfolio approach in times of volatility.
We’re definitely in a time of volatility. So having a portfolio approach to your development strategy, I think, is a really good idea.
ERIC OLANDER: OK, well, the report is China’s investment pivot and Africa’s industrial prospects. Any hope for African flying geese? Question mark.
Charles Kenney is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. It’s a fascinating report. We’ll put the links to it in the show notes and also on the site.
Charles, thank you so much for taking the time today to walk us through your findings. It’s, again, very timely in these very unpredictable, predictable days that we’re living in. So really appreciate your time.
Thank you, Eric. It’s good to be on. And we’ll be back again next week with another episode of the China in Africa podcast.
Cobus and Jero will be back from the conferences with a lot to report. And of course, if you’d like to follow all the great work that Kobus, Jero and the entire CGSP team are doing, go to ChinaGlobalSouth.com and you’ll see everything there. So for the whole CGSP team around the world, I’m Eric Olander.
Thank you so much for listening and for watching.
