China and the AU launched a 2026 Year of People-to-People Exchanges in Addis Ababa. The summit was long on symbolism and short on the scholarship and training numbers that sustain it.
Section
Intellectual
Joint Labs: The Quiet Infrastructure China Is Building Without Concrete
Three new China-Africa joint laboratories in soil, crop pests and animal disease are infrastructure you cannot photograph – the kind that decides whether knowledge stays on the continent.
The TEDA template: What a Suez park reveals about exporting Chinese industry
China did not just build a factory in Egypt – it copied a whole development model from Tianjin to the Red Sea. Whether that template travels to the rest of Africa is the real test.
Learning Zones: Chinese Parks Transfer Plenty of Jobs, Less of the Knowledge
Chinese zones in Ethiopia are pitched as classrooms for industrialisation. The evidence shows they teach hands well and managers rarely, leaving the deeper learning largely unrealised.
Grow or Green: Where Chinese Energy Lands in Africa’s Two Imperatives
Africa is told to cut emissions and to grow, at once. Chinese energy projects sit on the seam between those demands – and which way they tilt has shifted.
Rail’s return: Africa’s revival inside a larger modernisation arc
Rail is back on Africa’s agenda after decades of decline. The new lines are part of a wider story – and bounded by a financing gap measured in tens of billions.
The dragnet argument: why the China-Africa story is bigger than its biggest project
Every headline picks one mega-project to judge China in Africa. The aggregate – 13,000 km of rail and road, 170 schools, 100 ports – tells a different and harder-to-dismiss story.
Green Development: From Side Project to the Centre of China-Africa Energy
Solar fields in Morocco, wind farms in South Africa, hydropower in Uganda – China’s clean-energy projects in Africa have moved from the margins to the mainstream of the relationship.
South-South Exchange: China-Africa Ties as Knowledge, Not Only Capital
The roads and ports dominate the headlines, but the more durable transfer between China and Africa may be training, research centres and technical know-how.