Apart from China, the leading investor in African infrastructure, India and a few oil-rich Gulf countries are also providing funding for a number of large-scale infrastructure projects there. In terms of construction scale and total investment, these newly-arrived financiers have surpassed traditional investors such as members of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, showing a new trend in continued growth of South-South cooperation.
These investments have greatly improved Africa's infrastructure as well as the overall investment environment and boosted economic development on the continent.
The WB report also holds that the strong inter-complementary nature of economic cooperation between China and Africa has made continuous development of the Sino-African relationship and South-South cooperation a reality.
As far as infrastructure is concerned, Africa is in urgent need of better facilities across the board but not financially capable as it stares at a funding gap of at least $20 billion a year. This condition on Africa's part suits perfectly China's "going overseas strategy" and its internationally competitive construction industry.
On the other hand, Africa has rich resources such as oil, while blistering economic development has left China with a growing appetite for energy resources like oil. Such increasing demands have in effect led to price hikes of unprocessed products such as oil, the export of which Africa relies on. This is considered a beneficial factor for Africa.
The report does not respond directly to accusations that "China is plundering Africa's natural resources," but it points out objectively that the Chinese oil company has arrived in Africa to explore and produce oil much later than many of its Western cross-national counterparts did and its investment in Africa's oil industry is less than 10 percent of what others have invested there.
Also, despite overzealous hyping by the Western media about China's cooperation model of "infrastructure in exchange for resources", only 7 percent of China's investment in African infrastructure is connected to the excavation of natural resources.
In fact, totally different from the brutal and bloody ways the Western colonists plundered African resources in the distant past, China's cooperation with Africa in resource development nowadays, exactly as described in the country's official white paper, China's African policy, follows the principles of "reciprocity, mutual benefit and joint development" and is aimed at "helping African countries turn their advantage in natural resources into competitiveness and pushing African countries and regions toward sustainable development".
One will see the stark difference simply by comparing China's energy cooperation with Sudan, which has been a hot topic among Western media outlets in recent years, with the oil production status of Nigeria, the top oil-producing country in Africa.
