The Washington-based Center for Global Development published in February 2022 a study titled "Stuck Near Ten Billion: Public-Private Infrastructure Finance in Sub-Saharan Africa" by Nancy Lee and Mauricio Cardenas Gonzalez.
The study looks at construction-ready transactions with private participation in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) from 2007-2020. Total domestic and external finance for these projects averaged $9 billion annually for all of SSA.
Chinese development finance institutions (DFIs) provided 2.5 times more finance from 2007-2020 than all other bilateral DFIs combined. The US DFI finance was an order of magnitude smaller than China's finance, and no upward trend is yet evident.
Comment: While China's loan program has been impressive, this is the period when Chinese infrastructure financing for SSA was at its highest. It was not significant before 2007 and China signaled at the 2021 FOCAC it would start cutting back on infrastructure loans to Africa. It is also important to distinguish between loans and grant aid. The European Union, United States, and Japan are far ahead of China in providing grant aid to SSA.
