China-Africa summit preparations in high gear

(New Times, Rwanda, 29 April 2018) Preparations for the 2018 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) that will take place in September in South Africa are in high gear officials have said. In the 2015 summit, China pledged a new round of funding support to Africa’s development, worth $60 billion. The $60 billion pot was divided into $5 billion of free aid and interest-free loans, $35 billion of preferential loans and export credit and $5 billion dollars of additional capital for the China-Africa Development Fund and the Special Loan for the Development of African SMEs, and $10 billion of funding for a China-Africa production capacity cooperation. “Our investments in Africa exceeded 100 billion US Dollars and Chinese enterprises in Africa exceeded more than 3000; and over 70 percent of these are private Chinese companies,” said Dai Bing, the Director General of the Department of African affairs in the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.