China has delivered emergency satellite imagery to Nigeria and Ethiopia and software to Cameroon. The shared cooperation centre meant to anchor it all is still under construction.

China lists at least ten African uses for its BeiDou satellites, from precision farming to wildlife tracking. What the record does not yet list is the named centres to run them.

At the 2024 Beijing summit China named the digital economy its next African frontier – 20 projects inside a three-year RMB 360 billion (US$50 billion) package. The detail is thinner than the headline.

The headline China-Africa numbers are loans and ports. The quieter figure: 200,000km of optical fibre and broadband for six million households – infrastructure hard to see and hard to remove.