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Joe Biden’s Getting a Lot of Advice on How To Reset U.S. Foreign Policy in Africa and It All Calls for Less Focus on China

Scholars, analysts, and commentators in the U.S. and Africa are all offering lots of advice for what Joe Biden should to do to revitalize foreign policy in Africa. Seemingly without exception, the experts agree that Washington urgently needs to shift the focus away from China and towards ...

Donald Trump’s Spectacular Failure in Africa

At the sunset of the Trump administration, it's worth reflecting on all that went wrong with its Africa policy and specifically the oft-stated effort to contain China's rise on the continent. There's really no other way to describe it other than to say that it was a ...

Analysts: Why in The World Would the U.S. Want to Pay Off Ecuador’s Huawei Loans?

The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation recently signed what it called a "novel model" with Ecuador to help pay off billions of dollars of the South American country's loans to China that were used to buy Huawei equipment. In exchange, Washington received assurances that Quito will ban ...

How U.S.-Africa Policy Is Adapting To Competition With China

Recently, the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center and the Policy Center for the New South launched a pair of reports on external power competition in Africa, with one focused on traditional powers and the other on emerging powers in the region. One ...

U.S. Government Launches New Investment Program With the Aim of Providing African Countries an Alternative to China

The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and the Washington, D.C.-based think tank The Atlantic Council organized a five-hour online conference on Friday to discuss a new, private-sector-led initiative that aims to drive more U.S. investment towards Africa. The "Investing in Africa's Future" seminar featured many of ...

Analysis from Cobus van Staden

Plugging into African Agency

After several years of declining funding, the African end of the Belt and Road Initiative seems to be roaring back. The newest Griffith University/Green Development Finance Center data on the Belt and Road Initiative shows that engagement with Africa jumped by 395%, while a few big projects boosted engagement in Nigeria alone more than twelvefold.
These shifts indicate a window of opportunity for African electrification. 60% of Africans still ...

U.S. Struggles to Keep up With China's Commercial Expansion in Africa

Atlantic Council Senior Fellow Aubrey Hurby joins Eric and Cobus to discuss her new report on how the United States can catch up, or "challenge," China's commercial expansion in Africa. The bottom line, Aubrey writes, is that the U.S. can no longer be ...

The U.S. Wants to Challenge China’s Dominance in Lending to Developing Countries. Here’s How They Plan To Do It.

U.S. president Donald Trump signed the Better Utilization of Investments Leading to Development, also known as the BUILD Act, into law on October 5th, creating a powerful new development finance organization that is aimed at challenging China’s dominance in lending to developing countries. The ...