Kenyans watch the SGR cargo train as it leaves Mombasa for Nairobi, May 30, 2017. The project was a $3.3 billion investment backed by China. [AP Photo]

As China marks the 10th anniversary of the launch of its global infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), new data show lending to Africa has fallen to its lowest level in almost two decades.
A paper released this week by researchers at Boston University’s Global China Initiative said the pandemic, domestic economic woes, a policy shift and concerns about African debt were among the reasons lending in 2021 and 2022 dropped below $2 billion for the first time since the inception of the BRI.
In 2000-22, Chinese lenders loaned $170 billion to Africa — one of its major BRI partners — the research showed. But after peaking in 2016 at over $28 billion, lending to Africa dropped considerably in the past two years.
In 2021, China loaned $1.22 billion to Africa, and last year only nine loans amounting to $994.48 million were signed.
“Trends show that loan averages and amounts are decreasing and policy framing in China is also shifting, which leads us to expect less large-scale lending over $500 million,” lead researcher Oyintarelado Moses told VOA in an email.
“At the same time, this new policy framing of small and/or beautiful coming from China is showing that there will be smaller-valued loans.”
Social, environmental impact
Moses was referring to what Chinese President Xi Jinping has called Beijing’s “small and beautiful” approach, which aims to shift away from investment in large projects like railways and highways to focus on smaller loans that have more of a socially and environmentally beneficial impact.
Another trend the study found was that while previously most lending went to eastern and southern African countries, in 2021-22 there was a shift to western Africa, with countries like Senegal, Benin and Ivory Coast receiving most of the money.
That is because “these countries have historically borrowed less from China, so China had less loan exposure to these countries,” Moses said, noting that countries in other parts of Africa that have borrowed heavily in the past are currently managing debt distress.
Chinese lenders may also have become more cautious, the study found, because several African countries such as Zambia either have defaulted on their debt or are struggling to repay, leading to Western allegations of unsustainable lending.
In 2021-22, several loans for projects in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, Ghana and Zambia were canceled after failed negotiations, the study found.
During that same period, new loans were directed to a wider variety of sectors than in previous years, although transport remained a dominant area.
There were no new investments in energy projects, the African sector that attracted the most previous loans. The paper’s authors think China will continue to look for greener projects to fund after pledging to make the BRI “green” and ending the financing of coal projects overseas.
One of the most recent Chinese investments is a deal with South Africa signed in August to help with its energy crisis. The package will include a grant and emergency equipment from China totaling $30 million.
Two areas in which investments increased in 2021-22 were the environment — such as a loan to Senegal to help in “improving water resources” — and improvement in farming and education, the data showed.
Other reasons for the decrease in lending had more to do with China’s own economic slowdown.
Looking ahead
The study suggests future lending to Africa could include fewer large-scale loans of over $500 million and more loans under $50 million.
“African governments will continue to have demand because of infrastructure deficits and climate goals, but Chinese lenders will likely respond to that demand within these new policy parameters,” Moses told VOA.
“In general, we expect Chinese lending to rebound because of African country demands. But this rebound will likely not return to previous levels,” she said.
Cobus Van Staden, an analyst at the China Global South Project, agreed that lending rates will never again reach the levels seen in 2016.
However, he said, “there’s a tendency, I think, to just see the current decline in lending as, ‘Oh, the BRI’s over,’ which I think is unrealistic.
“I think the BRI has never been a stable thing, and it was always mutating and morphing, and it’s mutating and morphing again at the moment. So it’s going to take on some leaner, greener version of itself, and then we’ll see,” he told VOA.
Van Staden predicted that “as the economy in China improves and comes a little bit back up to speed … I think the lending will creep back up.”
He said he expected this to happen after next year’s Forum on China-Africa Cooperation.
“I think we’re probably in a kind of flat phase at the moment, and then I think it will start creeping back up, because the thing to remember is that Africa isn’t going away.”
Africa needs China and, likewise, Africa also offers China benefits such as access to the continent’s vast mineral resources, he said.

Winger Jakiya Whitfeld ran in four tries as the Australian Prime Minister’s XIII overcame their Papua New Guinea counterparts 56-4 on Saturday afternoon. 
Whitfeld, who spent this NRLW season with the Wests Tigers, scored a double in each half in an impressive showing which included running for over 200 metres. 

While it was a comfortable win for the visitors in the end, it was a performance likely to have pleased PNG coach Ben Jeffries on the back of the Test side making it through to the World Cup semi-finals last year.
The PNG PM’s XIII came up with a number of impressive goal-line stands in defence across the 70 minutes, before bringing the vocal crowd in Port Moresby to their feet with a try in the second half to Latoniya Norris.
Doubles from both Cassey Tohi-Hiku and Whitfeld gave the Australians a 18-0 lead at the break, with gusty conditions contributing to only one of the tries being converted. 

London, sep 23 (The Conversation) Storm Daniel landed on the Libyan coastal town of Toukrah in the early hours of September 10 and started moving east. Soon the wind was rising and heavy rain falling, forcing people to stay indoors. By afternoon the rain was clearly out of the ordinary. Albaydah city on the coast would receive 80 per cent of its annual rain before midnight, according to records from a local weather station that we have accessed. Also Read | Ukraine Cannot Become NATO Member Until Conflict Ends, Says Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. In less than 24 hours, thousands of people were dead, hundreds of thousands were missing, and towns and villages across Jebel Akhdar (the Green Mountain) in north-eastern Libya resembled a Hollywood disaster movie. Storm Daniel was a Mediterranean cyclone or hurricane (a so-called medicane) which struck Greece, Bulgaria, Libya, Egypt and Turkey over the course of a week. Medicanes are not rare. Such large storms happen in this part of the world every few years. But Daniel has proved to be the deadliest. Also Read | India Slams Pakistan for Raking Up Kashmir at UNGA; Calls for Vacating Occupied Areas, Stop Cross-Border Terrorism. At the time of writing, the World Health Organisation estimates that at least 3,958 people have died across Libya as a result of the floods, with more than 9,000 people still missing. Daniel was not an exceptionally big storm though. The medicane with the highest wind speeds was medicane Ianos in September 2020, which killed around four people and caused more than €224 million (£193 million) of damage. So what made Storm Daniel different? Less frequent, but stronger Like tropical cyclones, medicanes form in hot conditions at the end of summer. Most medicanes form to the west of the islands of Corsica and Sardinia. As they tend to strike the same regions each time, the people living in the western Mediterranean, southern Italy and western Greece, have built structures to deal with these storms and the occasional downpours they bring. Daniel formed relatively far to the east and struck north-eastern Libya, which is rare. Dozens of people were killed in communities across Cyrenaica, the eastern portion of the country. In the mountain gorge above the city of Derna, two dams failed in the middle of the night. Thousands of people, most of whom were asleep, are thought to have perished when the wave of water and debris swept down to the coast, destroying a quarter of the city. Since medicanes are formed in part by excess heat, events like this are highly sensitive to climate change. A rapid attribution study suggested greenhouse gas emissions made Daniel 50 times more likely. Despite this, the sixth assessment report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that medicanes are becoming less frequent but larger. Storm Daniel suggests where medicanes form and make landfall might be more important than their frequency and size. So does Libya need to brace itself for more of these events in the future than it has in the past, even if they affect the western Mediterranean less often? Clues from the past An important clue might lie deep underground, inside caves within north-eastern Libya. Although the caves are often dry today, they contain stalagmites which formed when rain passed through the soil, into the rock and dripped into the cave below thousands of years ago. These rock formations attest to times in the past when this region was considerably wetter. The caves in Libya – and in Tunisia and Egypt too – form these stalagmites when the global climate is warm. These bygone warm periods are not quite the same as the warm periods IPCC forecasts suggest modern climate change will usher in. But the way a hot world, a relatively ice-free Europe and North America and a wet northern Africa have regularly coincided in the past is striking. Striking and difficult to understand. That’s because the experiments that suggest medicanes will become less frequent as the climate warms belong to a pattern described by IPCC climate assessments, in which wet parts of the world are expected to get wetter and dry parts drier. So it is hard to understand why stalagmites tell us warmer periods in the past involved wetter conditions across the northern margin of the Sahara – one of the driest regions on Earth. Fortunately, scientists can learn more from the way stalagmites sometimes grow imperfectly, leaving tiny blobs of water trapped between the crystals. The stalagmite we recovered from Susah Cave on the outskirts of Libya’s Susah city, which was severely damaged in the storm, had quite a lot of water in it from wet periods dating to 70,000 to 30,000 years ago. The oxygen and hydrogen isotopes in this water are suggestive of rain drawn from the Mediterranean. This could indicate more medicanes were hitting the Libyan coast then. Our finding that more rain was falling above Susah Cave during warm periods suggests we should get more storms hitting eastern Libya as the climate warms. This is not quite what the IPCC forecasts, with their prediction of fewer but larger storms, show. But storm strength is measured in wind speed, not rainfall. The caves could well be recording an important detail of past storminess which we’re not yet able to forecast. Are stalagmites warning us that North Africa must prepare for future medicanes shifting further east? Our ongoing research aims to answer that question. The pattern of ancient desert margins receiving more rain during warm periods despite the “dry gets drier” pattern of global climate models is not unique to northern Africa but found around the world. Over millions of years, globally warm periods almost always correspond with smaller deserts in Africa, Arabia, Asia and Australia. This “dryland climate paradox” is important to unravel. Understanding the differences between climate models and studies of ancient rain will be key to navigating the future as safely as possible. (The Conversation)(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)