#Focac: Pretoria - China has “over-delivered” on its promise in 2012 to lend $20 billion to African countries for development, China's Commerce Minister Gao Hucheng said in Pretoria on Thursday.
He was addressing the ministerial meeting of the Forum for China-Africa Cooperation (Focac) which is preparing for the Focac leaders summit in Johannesburg starting on Friday.
China made the promise of $20 billion at the last Focac conference in Beijing three years ago.
Gao said the $20 billion included more than $17 billion in preferential loans for African infrastructure projects.
These included the Addis Ababa light rail network, which began operating this year, as the “first modern, urban light rail on the African continent”, the Abuja-Kaduna railway - “Nigeria's first modern rail line” - and the Kaleta Hydropower Station which had doubled Guinea's power generation. Gao added that over the past three years Chinese companies had reported nearly US$10 billion in direct investment in Africa, focusing on manufacturing, agriculture and services.
These included a glass-fibre plant in Egypt and a joint-venture aviation company in Ghana, which had become the country's second-largest airline.
And he said China had funnelled over half of its foreign aid to Africa since 2012, increasing its grant by almost 40 percent over the 2009-2011 period. The money had been used to train 30 241 Africans in various skills and to implement about 900 aid projects in agriculture, healthcare, education, culture, poverty relief and combating climate change.
More than 3 600 Chinese medical workers had been sent to Africa and free treatment had been offered to nearly 2 000 cataract patients.
Gao said China had taken the lead in international efforts to combat the ebola outbreak in West Africa last year, providing 1 200 tons of protection kits and 5 500 tons of food. It has also donated a bio-safety lab in Sierra Leone and a medical centre in Liberia, trained 13 000 local medics and anti-ebola personnel and had recently announced new measures to help the economic and social recovery of the three countries worst affected by ebola: Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.
China had also helped African countries and regional organisations install many customs and business inspection facilities and offered funding for the construction and feasibility studies of major regional infrastructure projects.
These included the completion of the Addis Ababa-Djibouti railway line which was the key to unlocking the Horn of Africa transport gridlock. Others included the Nairobi-Mombasa railway line and the smooth implementation of Tanzania's broadband backbone transmission network Phase III which would deliver connectivity for Tanzania and its six neighbours.
Gao said China had also provided zero-tariff access to its market for 97 percent of exports from the 31 African least developed countries which had diplomatic relations with China; had established the $5 billion special loan for African small and medium sized enterprises; and had supported the construction of more than 20 economic cooperation and trade zones in Africa.
It had also built more than 400 agro-technical demonstration centres, schools, and hospitals, had sent nearly 20 000 agricultural experts and doctors to the continent and had provided 55,000 scholarships for Africans to study in China and had trained nearly 83 000 Africans in various skills. In 2014 two-way trade had reached $222 billion, 21 times what it had been in 2000 when Focac was founded. China's investment stock exceeded $30 billion last year, more than 60 times the 2000 level.
AFRICAN NEWS AGENCY