India focuses on capacity-building in Africa unlike colonial powers
India’s engagement with Africa focuses on capacity-building rather than resource extraction, a new report has said, highlighting trade, investment and training initiatives that brought about structural transformation, according to a new report.
The report from India Narrative said that India refrains from merely creating "African dependency."
It pointed to India's food grain shipments to African countries facing shortages, medical equipment sent to Africa CDC during health emergencies, artificial limbs fitted for victims of conflict.
More than eighty thousand Africans benefited from scholarship and training programmes in the past decade and became engineers, diplomats, doctors and technicians.
"As Africa recalibrates its place in a changing world order, India’s approach to the continent offers a useful, if imperfect, case study in what a genuinely reciprocal partnership can look like," the report noted.
The media house said that India-Africa bilateral trade has climbed to around $93 billion, placing India among the continent’s largest trading partners.
Further, Indian investment in Africa exceeds $80 billion, spread across telecoms, energy, pharmaceuticals, agriculture and digital services. These are sectors African governments have prioritised for structural transformation, not merely extraction of raw commodities.
The report noted over 190 lines of credit worth over $10 billion have financed projects from power plants to water systems, and pointed to Indian initiatives such as an IIT campus in Zanzibar and a forensic sciences institute in Uganda as investing in African human capital.
"Too much of Africa’s external engagement over the decades has been organised around what can be dug out of the ground and shipped away," the report noted.
It said that Africa's relationship with India built around "telecom towers, generic medicines and digital platforms speaks to a different kind of ambition".
“Africa’s demographic weight and India’s technological momentum together represent one of the more compelling economic combinations of this century,” the report added.
