Promoting Connectivity of Infrastructure in the Context of One Belt, One Road Initiatives: Implications for Africa in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Africa is seen today as a continent of enormous opportunity, a destination for investors and development actors seeking high-growth markets. However, Africa’s economic growth is being hampered by weak infrastructure especially on connectivity. The connectivity bias is, however, more profound for landlocked economies. As a result, the level of intraregional connectivity is very low, when measured in the context of transcontinental highway links, power inter-connectors, or intraregional fiber optic backbone. Thus, despite phases of economic growth in many African countries in recent years, these insufficient infrastructure networks have limited cross-border flows of trade, capital, information and people, drastically affecting Africa’s growth and broader development performance and regional integration. In response to the infrastructure deficit and poor connectivity challenges, African countries have taken a number of concrete actions and made some progress toward the implementation of transport-related commitments and goals. Some of the initiatives the United Nations Transport and Communications Decade in Africa (UNTACDA-I) in 1978, the second decade program, UNTACDA-II in 1991, Program for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA) to provide strategic long-term planning for infrastructure development in a coherent way for all African stakeholders, Infrastructure Consortium for Africa (ICA) by African Development Partners and the Infrastructure Trust Fund (ITF). While these initiatives have successfully intervened with the construction of roads, rail, maritime port and airport to enhance the intra- and inter-country connectivity in the African continent, the poor intra- and inter-country connectivity challenges still remain. Consequently, China has also made a strong attempt to assist with the infrastructural connectivity in Africa. Adopting an explorative approach, the Chinese OBOR framework was analyzed vis-a-vis other sources of infrastructural support to the continent. Although, the OBOR initiative represents a cheaper alternative, the political economy of the initiative is not favorable to Africa. For example, the current financing arrangement in OBOR will not likely be beneficial to the African economies involved in the initiatives. In addition, there does not seem to have been any major public-private partnership arrangements for the OBOR projects in Africa. It was suggested that policy makers in Africa should adopt a more circumspect approach toward dealing with China.