Facilitating Industrialization in Africa: China’s Aid and African Industrial Capacity Building

Industrialization has long been the focus of national development plans in many African countries. Yet, Africa today is less industrialized than it was four decades ago. Industrial capacity building has recently been prioritized in Beijing’s aid policy as a prerequisite for a thriving manufacturing sector in Africa. As a result, China’s aid and investment in Africa focus on three areas: manufacture, infrastructure, and economic zone development. The choices reflect Beijing’s four decades of experience in its own industrialization process. The two cases of Angola and Zambia presented in this article illustrate the constraining factors in Africa’s industrialization: a business-unfriendly financial environment, vast untapped labor and resource potentials, an imbalanced growth model, and cumbersome bureaucratic procedures. To help Africa achieve higher levels of integration and industrialization, Beijing ought to do more and better along five lines of effort: first, by delineating the role of development cooperation in China-Africa capacity building cooperation; second, upgrading African industrial capacity both at the macro- and micro-levels; third, supporting infrastructure and agricultural modernization across Africa; fourth, working with African subregional institutions to stimulate regional integration and industrialization; and fifth, building greater complementarities with international organizations in Africa.