TITLE:
Africa and China in the Belt and Road Era: Strategic Agency
AUTHORS:
Jean Berlie, Manuel Benard
KEYWORDS:
Africa-China Relations, AIIB, Aligned Finance, Belt and Road Initiative, Climate-Aligned Finance, Climate-State Capacity, Digital Infrastructure, Multilateral Development Banks, New Infrastructure Corridors
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.14 No.4,
April
17,
2026
ABSTRACT: This article examines Africa-China relations through the evolving political economy of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) (Berlie, 2020). Moving beyond deterministic narratives that frame Africa as a passive recipient of external infrastructure finance, the paper argues that African states increasingly exercise strategic agency by embedded BRI-linked investments within national development plans, regional integration agendas, and climate-aligned infrastructure strategies. Combining historical analysis, geo-economic theory, and sectoral evidence, this article situates the BRI within a broader transformation of global connectivity governance characterized by corridor-based development, digitalization and intensifying competition among external actors. Particular attention is paid to the growing role of multilateral development banks—especially the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)—in standardizing governance, climate alignment, and asset-management practices in BRI-adjacent projects (Berlie, 2020). The analysis demonstrates that the developmental outcomes of Africa-China cooperation depend less on the scale of capital mobilization than on institutional capacity, policy coherence, and the governance of physical and digital infrastructure systems. The article concludes that the BRI in Africa constitutes a capital framework of Chinese external policy which engages with a majority of the African states.