China's President Xi Jinping has pledged CNY360bn ($50.7bn) in funding to the African continent over the next three years, and announced that Beijing was elevating ties with countries there to the “strategic level.”

Xi also told the 9th Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), which runs from September 4-6, that Beijing would help create “at least” 1mn new jobs in Africa.

“With its future growth in mind,” he told the summit, “I propose that bilateral relations between China and all African countries having diplomatic ties with China be elevated to the level of strategic relations.”

Xi said that more than half of the funding would be in credit while nearly $11bn would be in the form of grants of some kind.

China will cooperate with African countries in advancing “modernisation that is just, equitable, open, win-win, eco-friendly, featuring diversity and inclusiveness and underpinned by peace and security”.

Broad brush strokes of cooperation were laid out in a 10-point partnership Action Plan adopted at the Forum, attended by heads of state or government and other top officials from 53 African countries. Eswatini, which retains ties to Taiwan, was not represented.

FOCAC was founded in 2000 and has been held every three years since. During that time, China has built some 100,000 kilometres of road and 10,000km of railways in Africa. Xi expressed Beijing’s intention to move away from such large-scale infrastructure projects while advancing green technologies, he also called for a “China-Africa network” featuring land-sea links and coordinated development.

A number of large infrastructure projects, however, were announced ahead of or during the Forum, in addition to pledges from Xi on areas of enhanced bilateral “cooperation” with specific African countries:

• Nigeria and China said in a joint statement they had agreed to “deepen cooperation” in infrastructure, including in transportation, ports and free trade zones; the China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC) has signed a $3.3bn agreement with Nigeria's Brass Fertilizer and Petrochemical Company Ltd (BFPCL) to develop the Brass Industrial Park in the West African country as well as a methanol complex.
• Tanzania obtained a commitment from Xi to revive a long-stalled railway connecting the country to neighbouring Zambia. Beijing funded the building of the 1,860km Tanzania-Zambia Railway Authority (TAZARA) route between 1970 and 1975, enabling Zambia to access the sea through Tanzania instead of via Zimbabwe into South Africa. In February 2024 China offered $1bn to rehabilitate the link.
• Zimbabwe also was promised deeper cooperation, in agriculture, mining, environmentally friendly traditional and new energy and transportation infrastructure.
• Kenya said the Chinese leader promised to facilitate the import of agricultural products from the East African country, and secured a pledge for greater cooperation on the Rironi-Mau Summit-Malaba motorway, expected to cost $1.2bn; Kenya also just joined the China-led Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) with an eye towards securing an alternative source of long-term funding to the IMF and World Bank, at a time global credit firms have raised the East African country’s risk of default on sovereign borrowing.

China is the world's largest bilateral lender, with the lion’s share going to Africa. Beijing pledged some $191bn to countries on the continent between 2006 and 2021. Chinese loans to African countries reached a seven-year high in 2023. According to the Chinese Loans to Africa Database compiled by researchers at Boston University's Global Development Policy Centre, Angola, Ethiopia, Egypt, Nigeria and Kenya are the top borrowers.

Capital Economics, a UK-based global thinktank, said in a note on August 30 that data from Boston University showed that Chinese lending to Africa reached $4.61bn in 2023, more than three times the amount lent in the previous year.

The Chinese loans, the researchers said, have been increasingly going to local banks, thereby helping to avoid exposure to credit risks associated with those and other developing countries.

All this comes as Beijing seeks to continue expanding its influence in Africa amid tensions with the United States and other Western countries.

China is Africa’s largest trading partner. Nearly one-quarter of the continent’s exports – mainly minerals and metals, including copper, cobalt, lithium and rare earth minerals – are exported to the Asian superpower, whose companies increasingly also run the mines.