China’s government has backed over 1,700 projects in Africa since 2000

China’s government has backed over 1,700 projects in Africa since 2000
Database reveals China’s government has backed nearly 2,000 projects on continent in apparent attempt to win favor. The country’s financial commitments are significantly larger than previous estimates.

Agence France-Presse

China committed more than US$75 billion to Africa in the past decade, coming close to the level of US money although the nature of Beijing’s support was far different, a study said on Monday.

The database released by the Center for Global Development aims to be the most comprehensive account yet of foreign assistance by China, which has faced criticism in Western countries suspicious of Beijing’s motives.

The report found that China committed US$75.4 billion to Africa from 2000 to 2011, just under the US$90 billion by the United States and representing about one-fifth of the total from all major donor nations.

But the researchers verified that only around US$1.1 billion a year from China was official development assistance as defined by the club of major donors under the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

As defined by the group, aid needs to have economic development as the main objective and any loans must have concessional rates – or at least 25 per cent of the money coming as a grant.

“Pound for pound, when you compare the US versus China, the total official finance is roughly comparable. However, different people mean different things when they talk about Chinese aid,” said Bradley Parks of the College of William and Mary, who is executive director of the AidData initiative behind the study.

“The composition of the official finance is very different,” he said.

Amid the rapid growth of China’s economy, the emerging Asian power has increasingly been seen as a major player in international development, but it has resisted calls to be more transparent on its spending.

Faced with opaque data from Beijing, the new database instead draws on thousands of media reports about Chinese projects, tracking them to verify that they are going forward.

Western nations have led the charge that China is primarily interested in Africa for its natural resources and ignores the conditions of democracy and good governance on which the United States, Europeans and others insist.

The database showed a wide variety of Chinese initiatives in Africa. The most funding went to debt relief, followed by transport and storage projects and then by the agricultural sector.

Items funded by China ranged from a defence college in Zimbabwe, whose veteran leader Robert Mugabe is a pariah in the West, to an opera house in Algeria.

Ghana was the top recipient of Chinese money, although Beijing gave widely across the continent – except to countries that recognise Taiwan, which Beijing considers part of its territory.

Parks, the co-author of the study, said that the researchers’ main goal was to improve public information about Chinese assistance, not to answer questions on Beijing’s intentions.

“Frankly, there are a lot of people out there who have taken very strong opinions on one side or the other,” he said.

“From our perspective, the value of what we’ve accomplished is to try to create a public good of use to researchers, journalists and civil society organisations and they can draw their own conclusions,” he said.

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Video: China’s new president toured Africa to boost trade and investment at the end of March 2013
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s maiden foreign tour as head of state was “historic and fruitful”. The visit ended March 31, 2013.

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Video: China in Africa: Assessing the Far East Footprint

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Video: AidData: The Chinese connection
How  The College of William & Mary (in Williamsburg, Virginia)produced the AidData project

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Official Finance

All Projects

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The House Committee on Foreign Affairs
The House Committee on Foreign Affairs, chaired by Republican Ed Royce of California, considers legislation that impacts the diplomatic community, which includes the Department of State, the Agency for International Development (USAID), the Peace Corps, the United Nations, and the enforcement of the Arms Export Control Act.

Foreign Assistance Act of 1961
On November 3, 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed the The Foreign Assistance Act and issued Executive Order 10973. The Foreign Assistance Act reorganized the structure of existing U.S. foreign assistance programs, separated military from non-military aid, and created a new agency, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to administer those non-military, economic assistance programs. This Act has since been amended by Congress.
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Video: Hearing: Securing U.S. Interests Abroad: The FY 2014 Foreign Affairs Budget -Opening Statements
2172 House Rayburn Office Building Washington, DC 20515 | Apr 17, 2013 9:30am

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When the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was created, it brought together several existing foreign assistance organizations and programs. Until then, there had never been a single agency charged with foreign economic development, so with the passage of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 by Congress, U.S. foreign assistance activities underwent a major transformation.

Leading this transformation was President John F. Kennedy. President Kennedy recognized the need to unite development into a single agency responsible for administering aid to foreign countries to promote social and economic development. On November 3, 1961, USAID was born and with it a spirit of progress and innovation. November 3, 2011 marked USAID’s 50th Anniversary of providing U.S. foreign development assistance From the American People.

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USAID Higher Education Solutions Network (HESN)

USAID has created a constellation of seven Development Labs that harness the intellectual power of great American and international academic institutions and that catalyze the development and application of new science, technology, and engineering approaches and tools to solve some of the world’s most challenging development problems.

These Labs will help USAID and the development community to discover more innovative, results-driven, efficient, cost effective and accessible solutions to global development challenges in areas such as global health, food security and chronic conflict. The HESN will create a novel constellation of seven Development Labs that will enable USAID to:

•   Improve its understanding of development problems and solutions through better data and analytics
• Test, evaluate, and catalyze technologies for development
• Design, create, and incubate revolutionary approaches in addressing development problems including the incubation of new low-cost technologies and innovations
• Promote entrepreneurship to sustain and scale these tools and approaches; and harness the enthusiasm and interest of students for development.

Inaugural USAID Development Labs
Currently there are no labs located at any of the U.S. Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs)

University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley’s leadership in developing innovative and practical solutions for global problems is being recognized in a $20 million cooperative agreement with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The award will fund a new multidisciplinary lab to ready inventions for the developing world, train a new generation of development practitioners and innovators, and launch a brand new field of research — Development Engineering.

Science and technology can create major breakthroughs in international development, but social and economic barriers such as market and institutional failures sometimes prevent potentially transformative innovations from reaching the word’s poor. In partnership with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories (LBNL), the UC Berkeley Development Impact Lab (DIL) will bring together world-class science, engineering, and economics to change the way new technologies for development are designed and distributed in the developing world. The Lab’s ultimate goal is to create a new field of Development Engineering that integrates science, engineering and social sciences and formalizes the use of advanced science and technology to understand and address development problems.

Background
The Lab will build on pioneering work by UC Berkeley’s Blum Center for Developing Economies which, together with the Center for Effective Global Action, has strategically combined social science expertise with engineering, natural sciences and public health to generate comprehensive, demand-driven solutions to development challenges. The Lab will also incorporate the work of the new development institute, LBNL Institute for Globally Transformative Technologies (LIGTT). DIL will train a new generation of development practitioners and innovators drawn from all academic disciplines by building on the Blum Center’s undergraduate minor in Global Poverty and Practice. The Lab will also integrate and expand the BigIdeas@Berkeley competition, which provides funding, mentoring and encouragement to promising student-led initiatives at the product development, testing and scaling phases. These elements, together with the launch of a new academic field of Development Engineering, will engage a rich ecosystem of scientists, engineers, and economists working together on global development issues.

Duke University
Duke University will be able to draw on its expertise in social entrepreneurship and innovation to tackle global health challenges, thanks to a $10 million award from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) that was announced November 8, 2012 in Washington, DC.

Duke University will lead a Development Lab, the Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator at Duke, that will improve global healthcare in two main ways. First, the Lab will identify and scale promising new technologies in healthcare delivery and prevention. Second, it will evaluate and share knowledge regarding scaling strategies and the results of the program to enable better scaling of innovations in other development sectors, informing USAID programming. Our approach to supporting social entrepreneurship for improved global health outcomes is to:

• Spark , select, and scale new solutions and technologies to address global health challenges, including many from low and middle income countries
• Engage in building an ecosystem of networking support and access to investment capital to help entrepreneurs scale their enterprises
• Assess the effectiveness of SEAD, the development problems it engages, and the solutions it support
• Disseminate practical and academic knowledge and evidence about scaling health care innovations globally, especially among actors on the ground in developing economies

Background
The Development Lab will combine the unique strengths of Duke University through programs such as The International Partnership for Innovative Healthcare Delivery (IPIHD) and the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE). These programs have world-class expertise on scaling social impact and knowledge on global health with resources from the SJF Institute/ Investors’ Circle, the world’s largest early-stage impact investing network to foster and scale-up high-impact innovations in global health.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT will receive up to $25 million in funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as part of a new five-year project intended to fight poverty by developing and evaluating useful technologies for communities around the globe.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will lead two main efforts. The first, the International Development Innovation Network will foster local innovation by supporting the ingenuity, creativity and resiliance of people living in poverty. IDIN aims to reverse the trend that technology is designed almost exclusively for the richest 10 percent of the world’s customers while ignoring the needs of the other 90 percent.

Development Innovation Proposed Activities
Successful technologies that have broad application and impact happen when the problem is properly defined, the solution is appropriate and well designed, and the complex supporting environment is in place to support a viable business. The Lab will initially focus on technologies that support the priorities in USAID’s 2011-2015 Policy Framework; this could include technologies that bring clean drinking water to poor families, innovations that bring reliable power sources to remote rural communities, or solutions to pressing health dillemmas.

The College of William and Mary
A critical information gap—the absence of subnationally geocoded aid data—confounds efforts to effectively deliver foreign assistance. The AidData Center for Development Policy will lead a global effort to correct this problem by collaborating with USAID’s GeoCenter to create high resolution geospatial data and powerful analytical and GIS tools that enable USAID and the global development community to more effectively target, monitor and evaluate aid projects and programs.

Background
The AidData Center for Development Policy is an outgrowth of AidData, a global leader in the provision of reliable, timely, and detailed information about foreign assistance projects. Through this partnership with USAID, the Lab will build a world-class research consortium that consists of geographers, economists, epidemiologists, political scientists, computer scientists, and statisticians who will use these geospatial data to help USAID, other donor agencies, and developing country governments make evidenced-based policy and resource allocation decisions.

Texas A&M University
Texas A&M University has been selected by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to be a partner in its new Higher Education Solutions Network (HESN) — a groundbreaking endeavor designed to develop innovative solutions to global development challenges.

The Development Lab led by Texas A&M, Center on Conflict and Development (C&D), will study the intersection between poverty, conflict, and food insecurity to describe what has worked in the past and plan for the future to improve conditions in fragile and conflict-affected countries. The C&D Center will catalyze development results for these communities by providing new data, expertise, and policy advice for USAID derived from the interrelationships of conflict, poverty, governance, and development assistance, ultimately leading to a reduction in and prevention of conflict.

Background
Although experience among practitioners indicates that development in conflict-affected societies can show results, researchers admit that more must be known about the best way to effect change. The Lab builds on work in generating datasets that will allow deep analysis of the relationships between conflict, poverty, and foreign assistance. The Lab’s research and development program will bridge the gap between data and development practice throughout some of the world’s most fragile communities.

Michigan State University
Michigan State University will use a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development to improve agricultural production and reduce poverty in areas of the world suffering from rapid urbanization, population growth and skills gaps.

Receiving up to $25 million throughout 5 years, finding solutions to the problems that affect global food production will be the focus of MSU’s new Global Center for Food Systems Innovation, co-directed by Reitumetse Mabokela, professor of Higher, Adult and Lifelong Education in the College of Education. The center is part of USAID’s Higher Education Solutions Network — a partnership with seven American and foreign universities designed to develop solutions to global development challenges.

The Global Center for Food Systems Innovation (GCFSI) Development Lab led by Michigan State University will contribute to sustainable food production and consumption over the next 10-15 years. The Development Lab will develop a sophisticated understanding of mega-trends affecting global food systems: population growth, rapid urbanization, climate change, pressures on land, and skills gaps in the food system workforce. This knowledge base will be used to inform USAID’s programs aimed at developing and scaling locally-appropriate solutions to global hunger and health.

Background
The Lab’s holistic approach to global food systems combines expertise from multiple disciplines — including agriculture, anthropology, biotechnology, economics, education, and engineering — to understand global food systems more thoroughly. The Lab will address these trends through several approaches aimed at finding new development solutions

Makerere University (Uganda)
Makerere University is Uganda’s largest and second-oldest higher institution of learning. It is located in Kampala.

Makerere University will lead the Development Lab ResilientAfrica, an international partnership that will apply science and technology to improve the resilience of African communities against natural and political stresses. ResilientAfrica will unite 20 African universities in 16 countries, representing over 300,000 students and faculty members, to form a network to empower African communities.

Understanding and strengthening resilience is key to enabling development in Africa. Rapid scientific and technical advances provide Africa’s increasingly educated youth the tools needed to accelerate and strengthen responses to development barriers, such as overpopulation, disease, chronic civil conflict, lack of infrastructure, and poor governance. These barriers alone and in combination prevent much of the population from escaping poverty, leaving them in cycles of crisis, and must be understood to be overcome.

Background
The success and failure of development efforts relies upon integrated and culturally adapted solutions. This Africa-based consortium will engage students to develop new solutions for Africans by Africans through contextually relevant and responsive tools and technologies. ResilientAfrica will build a shared understanding how to access, apply, and obtain development results from those tools and technologies, and deepen and broaden African experience and expertise in translating innovations in science and technology into practical solutions.

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November 8, 2012

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has chosen The College of William & Mary to lead a five-year, $25-million award to create the AidData Center for Development Policy, a research center that will create data and tools to enable the global development community to more effectively target, coordinate, deliver, and evaluate foreign aid.

The award, the largest single award in The College of William & Mary history, is a part of USAID’s Higher Education Solutions Network program.

AidData was founded in 2009 as a collaborative initiative between William & Mary, Brigham Young University, and Development Gateway and has established itself as a global leader in the provision of reliable, timely and detailed information about foreign assistance projects.

The new AidData Center for Development Policy, headquartered at William & Mary’s Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations in Williamsburg, Virginia, is a joint venture between William & Mary, Development Gateway, Brigham Young University (BYU), the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin), and ESRI, a GIS technology company.

Leading the new Center from W&M will be Michael Tierney, co-director of the Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations, and Brad Parks, the co-executive director of AidData. They conceived the project to build the Project-Level Aid Database (PLAID), AidData’s precursor, as a student-faculty research project in 2003. Tierney and Parks also led the effort that resulted in the USAID award.

Source: The College of William & Mary

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http://aiddatachina.org