Economics – Global & Regional · Editorial

By Moakanyi Magazine · China-in-Africa · June 2026

Africa drew its own connectivity blueprint – the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa, or PIDA – long before the Belt and Road reached the continent. At the FOCAC Beijing Summit in September 2024, China pledged 30 infrastructure projects across five African sub-regions and a multimodal sea-rail network, explicitly aligned with PIDA's Second Priority Action Plan, which runs from 2021 to 2030. The contradiction worth watching is alignment in practice: a continental plan financed by a partner with its own corridor logic does not automatically serve the continental plan.

The pledge: 30 projects inside a US$50 billion package

FOCAC 2024 committed RMB 360 billion (about US$50 billion) over three years – RMB 210 billion in credit lines, RMB 80 billion in assistance and at least RMB 70 billion in company investment. Connectivity sits as one of ten partnership initiatives, with the 30 projects and the sea-rail network named under it, set alongside themes from green energy to security.

China's readout positions these as support for PIDA-PAP2 and for the African Continental Free Trade Area, with a credit-heavy structure: more than half the headline sum is lending rather than grant. The figures are Beijing's own, treated here as an attributed claim, and the disbursement record will arrive later. Credit lines in particular convert into debt on national balance sheets, which makes the terms of these projects – tenor, currency, interest – as consequential as their existence. A pledge denominated mostly in loans is a different proposition from one denominated mostly in grants.

A US$50 billion headline covers ten themes and is mostly credit – infrastructure is a slice, and a financed one.

PIDA's real problem is structuring, not slogans

AUDA-NEPAD's own analysis is blunt that Africa's bottleneck is project preparation, not just capital. Projects take three to seven years to reach financial close, preparation costs run to 5-10 percent of investment, and 83 percent of African public-private partnerships have been abandoned, mostly for poor design rather than missing money.

The Abidjan-Lagos corridor needed US$22.7 million in joint preparatory studies and an 18-month expert team, and produced a supranational corridor authority, before it could move. A pledge of 30 projects helps only if it is matched to projects that are properly structured to begin with. Counting projects at a summit is the easy part; turning them into bankable, well-governed assets – with risk allocated, tariffs modelled and offtake secured – is the slow work that decides whether the pledge becomes infrastructure or a footnote. Numbers announced are not the same as projects prepared.

Finance lands on bankable projects – the scarce input is preparation, which a project count does not supply.

Whose corridor logic prevails

By AUDA-NEPAD's count, China already supplied roughly a quarter of PIDA priority commitments – about US$25.7 billion of the more than US$100 billion logged in 2018 – as traditional donor shares declined. That makes Beijing a structurally important financier of Africa's plan, not a marginal one, and it gives Chinese routing preferences real gravitational pull over where corridors actually go.

This raises the integration question squarely. Corridors that connect an interior to a port oriented towards export to China serve a different map than corridors knitting African markets to each other under AfCFTA. The sea-rail network named at FOCAC 2024 is efficient for moving goods between Africa and China; whether it is configured to move goods between African states is a design choice, not a given. The same steel can build a continental market or a faster extraction route, and the difference lies in alignment, not announcement.

The same rail line can integrate a continent or drain it towards one coast – the routing is the politics.

Belt and Road meets the continental blueprint

The alignment China stresses is real on paper. FOCAC 2024 named the Second PIDA Priority Action Plan, the 2021-2030 window, and the spread across five sub-regions – the language of the African plan, not a parallel Chinese one. That matters, because earlier Belt and Road projects in Africa were often negotiated bilaterally with little reference to the continental sequence, leaving a scatter of national assets rather than a connected network.

The test is whether the 30 projects land on PIDA's priority list or merely near it. A project counted as PIDA-aligned because it sits in the right country and sector is not the same as one drawn from PIDA's own ranked pipeline. The credit-heavy structure sharpens the point: where loans rather than grants do most of the work, the borrower carries the downside if a project was chosen for its fit with a financier's corridor rather than the continent's plan.

Alignment claimed at a summit is a starting position – alignment in the ranked pipeline is the proof.

PIDA gives Africa a plan and a yardstick, and the Second Priority Action Plan gives it a current one. Chinese finance can accelerate that plan or bend it. The continental interest is to hold the 2024 pledges to PIDA's own sequencing and standards, so the 30 projects build the integrated market the blueprint was drawn for – rather than a faster route to the coast. The plan is Africa's; the discipline to keep finance serving it has to be Africa's too.

Sources: China MFA – FOCAC 2024, AUDA-NEPAD / PIDA