Identifying Forward and Backward Linkages From China's Infrastructure Investment in Africa

Abstract

The continent of Africa must industrialize to eradicate poverty and create jobs for its 12 million African youth who join its workforce yearly. One of the major factors hindering industrialization has been the insufficient stock of productive infrastructure that would permit companies to thrive in industries with robust comparative advantage. Within the context of Africa-China cooperation, China has emerged as a key partner to several African nations, including financing as well as constructing large-scale infrastructure projects. With emphasis on the Tazara railway, Mombasa-Nairobi railway, and Ghana Bui hydropower dam, this paper employs backward and forward linkages theory to investigate what role these three Chinese-led infrastructure projects play in African infrastructure development and what the infrastructure investment leads to concerning creating new opportunities and businesses for Africa. The paper discovers that these three Chinese-led infrastructure projects have multiple gains and linkages for and beyond the three various projects areas. Above all, these three Chinese-led infrastructure projects were seen by the Chinese government to fulfil its goals in Africa.

The urbanising dynamics of global China: speculation, articulation, and translation in global capitalism

“…We build upon the emergent body of the literature that has recently engaged with the infrastructural and real estate turn of African cities (Gillespie, 2020;Goodfellow, 2022), which has placed China as a significant source of investment and development aid (e.g. Carmody & Murphy, 2022;Omoruyi, 2021;Wan et al, 2020).…”