China has thrown the door open to African goods. Walking through it with finished products, rather than raw ore, is the harder task that no tariff schedule can do for the continent.
Section
Economics
China’s vanishing factory jobs: Africa’s chance, if it can catch them
The World Bank has floated 85 million manufacturing jobs leaving China as wages rise. Whether Africa captures a meaningful share is a question of readiness, not destiny.
Diamniadio: Senegal’s bet that a Chinese garment line can build an industry
Senegal spent about US$44m on a park outside Dakar and pinned 23,000 jobs on it. The first anchor tenant is a Chinese factory sewing T-shirts for the American market.
Huajian in Ethiopia: A Shoemaker as the Test Case for Industrial Linkage
A Chinese shoe firm exporting Ethiopian-made footwear to the US and Europe is the model linkage story – and the clearest evidence of how hard local sourcing actually is.
Private Chinese Parks: Ethiopia’s Export Bet, Built Largely by Outsiders
Ethiopia’s drive to become Africa’s top manufacturer leans on private, often Chinese-owned zones. They have delivered factories and exports – and a dependence on foreign developers to build them.
Eastern Industrial Zone: A Chinese Park Counted in Jobs, Not Just Square Metres
A Chinese-built park 35km from Addis Ababa was meant to seed 20,000 local jobs. By late 2017 it had created roughly 10,000 – a real number, and a measure of the distance left to travel.
The Institutional Bottleneck in South Luangwa and the Economics of Safari Excellence
South Luangwa’s institutional bottleneck: why high-end safari value detaches from local communities, who wins, who is excluded, and the reforms that reconnect
Power as Productivity: Why Africa’s Energy Gap Is a Jobs Problem First
Energy access is usually counted in households connected. The sharper measure is what unreliable power does to the firms and workers who already have a line.
Green Triad: How Hydropower, Wind and Solar Anchor a New China-Africa Bargain
Beijing frames its African energy work as a single green transition. The record shows three very different technologies, doing very different jobs, in very different places.