China lending to Africa: Recipe for development or doom? 

Is China is fueling Africa’s economy? That could be a question with so many angles to explore – such as – is it worth it for Africa to accept humongous loans from the industrial giant amid her journey to prosperity while opening doors for her nations to invest and heavily mark China’s ingenuity across continent-wide African infrastructure?   China, one of the world’s top economies provides eight types of foreign aid: complete projects, goods and materials, technical cooperation, human resource development cooperation, medical assistance, emergency humanitarian aid, volunteer programs, and debt relief (Brookings).  The World Bank has been ousted by China as the world’s largest bilateral creditor, making China the largest single country creditor on Planet Earth (The African Report, 2021).  In a larger context, Africa is now heavily being catered for financially by China. According to a report by The African Report, which cited data from China-Africa Initiative, between the year 2000 to 2018, China extended around $148 billion of loans to Africa, which were mostly targeted towards fueling infrastructure development.   The most fascinating facts across the table are that the Paris Club group of bilateral lenders made up of mostly developed countries from the Global North, were once large bilateral lenders in Africa, “but by 2017 debt to the Paris Club amounted to less than 5 per cent of external debt in Africa,” according