An independent study announced on Thursday, August 29, 2024, that loans from China to Africa are worth 4.61 billion dollars in 2023.

In recent years, China has become the number one bilateral lender for many African countries, such as Ethiopia. According to the Boston University study, Chinese lenders lent the continent a total of $182.28 billion between 2000 and 2023. Most of the funding is intended for the African energy, transport and information and communication technology (ICT) sectors. The largest loans last year include a loan of nearly $1 billion from the Chinese Development Bank in Nigeria for the Kaduna-Kano railway and a liquidity facility of the same size granted by the lender to the central bank of Egypt. In reality, Africa obtained more than $10 billion in loans per year from China between 2012-2018, thanks to President Xi Jinping's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), but loans fell precipitously starting with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in