Tag Archives: United States of America

More Anglophone African Students are Joining Universities in China than the U.S.

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This is from Rogue Chiefs:

chinauni.pngTHE surge in the number of African students in China is remarkable. In less than 15 years the African student body has grown 26-fold – from just under 2,000 in 2003 to almost 50,000 in 2015.

According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, the US and UK host around 40,000 African students a year. China surpassed this number in 2014, making it the second most popular destination for African students studying abroad, after France which hosts just over 95,000 students.

And it looks like soon Africans will comprise the biggest proportion of foreign students in China:

Chinese universities are filled with international students from around the world, including Asia, the Americas, Europe and Oceania. The proportion of Asian international students still dwarfs the number of Africans, who make up 13% of the student body. But this number, which is up from 2% in 2003, is growing every year, and much faster than other regions. Proportionally more African students are coming to China each year than students from anywhere else in the world.

Also, African students in China are mostly studying mandarin and engineering:

Based on several surveys, most students tend to be enrolled in Chinese-language courses or engineering degrees. The preference for engineering may be due to the fact that many engineering programmes offered by Chinese universities for international students are taught in English.

And they are more likely than their counterparts in the West to go back home after finishing their studies.

Due to Chinese visa rules, most international students cannot stay in China after their education is complete. This prevents brain-drain and means that China is educating a generation of African students who – unlike their counterparts in France, the US or UK – are more likely to return home and bring their new education and skills with them.

Perhaps the much-discussed skills transfer (or lack thereof) from China to African states will take place at Chinese universities instead of construction sites on the Continent.

The recent decline in the number of foreign students applying to U.S. colleges and universities will no doubt reinforce China’s future soft power advantage over the U.S. in Africa.

What does this mean for research in Africa? According to The Times Higher Education:

chinauni2.pngChina’s investment in Africa is having a positive impact on research, citing China’s African Talents programme. Running from 2012 to 2015, the programme trained 30,000 Africans in various sectors and also funded research equipment and paid for Africans to undertake postdoctoral research in China.

…. the 20+20 higher education collaboration between China and Africa as a key development in recent years. Launched in 2009, the initiative links 20 universities in Africa with counterparts in China.

And oh, the Indian government is also interested in meeting the demand for higher education in Africa.

In December 2015, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi also announced that the country would offer 50,000 scholarships for Africans over the next five years.

Notice that all this is only partially a result of official Chinese (or Indian) policy. The fact of the matter is that the demand for higher education in Africa has risen at a dizzying pace over the last decade (thanks to increased enrollments since 2000). To the extent that there aren’t enough universities on the Continent to absorb these students, they will invariably keep looking elsewhere.

According to the Economist: 

Opening new public institutions to meet growing demand has not been problem-free, either. In 2000 Ethiopia had two public universities; by 2015 it had 29. “These are not universities, they’re shells,” says Paul O’Keefe, a researcher who has interviewed many Ethiopian academics, and heard stories of overcrowded classrooms, lecturers who have nothing more than undergraduate degrees themselves and government spies on campus.

In those countries where higher education was liberalised after the cold war, private universities and colleges, often religious, have sprung up. Between 1990 and 2007 their number soared from 24 to more than 460 (the number of public universities meanwhile doubled to 200).

And on a completely random note, the black line on the graph above may explain the otherwise inexplicable persistence of the CFA zone in francophone Africa.

Quick Thoughts on President Donald J. Trump and U.S. Foreign Policy in Africa

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The Republican Party will, for the first time since 2006, control all branches of government. That means that the only institutional speed bump faced by Republican policymaking will be parliamentary rules in the Senate. But even then there is nothing to stop Republicans from going nuclear and rewriting the rules with a view of limiting the Democratic Senators’ capacity to stall the legislative process. If we’ve learned anything from the last eight years is that the more unconventional and anti-institutionalist wing of the Republican party has a lot of power.

Which means that the institutional expression of American politics over (at least) the next two years will depend A LOT on moderate institutionalists within the Republican Party.

So what does this mean for U.S. foreign policy in Africa?

  1. Power Africa, PEPFAR, AGOA, MCA, and other aid initiatives are likely going to be on the chopping block. There will likely be a lot of money for security, but those will largely be channeled through AFRICOM and may not be so great at achieving the same outcomes as the normatively preferable non-security development assistance.
  2. U.S. Exports to Africa may also see a decline. The Republicans do not like the EXIM Bank. The EXIM Bank helps finance U.S. exports to Africa. In theory President Trump might see the EXIM Bank as good for U.S. companies like Boeing. But this will only make sense if Boeing is still able to compete with Airbus after “it brings the jobs back home” (quick aside, Airbus is in Europe, where the French and the Germans will vote soon, so there is that….)
  3. Democracy promotion will see a rollback. President Trump is likely to go back to the old-fashioned purely interest-based engagement with foreign governments. This will be a sucker punch against democracy activists everywhere. Expect more term limit violations. The so-called democratic recession may finally arrive.
  4. A few gold producing countries — Ghana, South Africa, Tanzania and others — will benefit from the rush to gold occasioned by (hopefully) short-term economic uncertainty. Other commodity producers will be hit hard by global economic uncertainty. I would really hate to be the Finance Minister of Nigeria, Zambia, or Angola right now.
  5. Lastly, U.S. foreign policymaking through the IMF, the World Bank and the UN will be less stable. All the potential picks to head the State Department are on record as being not too enthusiastic about these multilateral institutions.

It’s not all doom and gloom though.

On balance, Republican foreign policymakers may actually achieve better outcomes than Democrats in Africa (as I think is the case over the last two decades). Less moralizing, they may focus on hard-nosed self-interested engagements — via trade for example — that are, on balance, good for Africans. Less handholding may even force African governments to realize that they are on their own, especially as Europe recedes inward as well. It may also force reformist pockets on the Continent to focus on feasible solutions to general problems of political and economic underdevelopment that are consistent with their domestic political economies; rather than constantly chasing aid dollars and euros. Such developments would actually enhance political development in such African states.

Even the potential escalation in the global rivalry between US and China (and possibly Russia) might be good for Africa. Everyone is gonna need allies in their corner for fights at the UN (of course conditional on African policymakers being strategic, rather than acting as mere water carriers for global powers).

Of course the wildcard in all of this is whether the right people will step up to the plate and agree to serve in a Trump administration.

Here at the Africanist Perspective the official line is that if asked to serve, and if you have the knowledge and expertise, please go ahead and join the administration. President Donald Trump’s Secretary of State and head of USAID will need you.

U.S. allies around the world need you.

How to avoid the resource curse, or how Norway spends its $882 billion global fund

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This is from the Economist:

This week the “Pension Fund Global” was worth Nkr7.3 trillion ($882 billion), more than double national GDP. No sovereign-wealth fund is bigger (see chart). It owns over 2% of all listed shares in Europe and over 1% globally. Its largest holdings are in Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft and Nestlé, among 9,000-odd firms in 78 countries.

In designing the fund, Norway got a lot right. Its independence is not constitutionally guaranteed, but it is protected as a separate unit within the central bank, overseen by the finance ministry and monitored by parliament. It is run frugally and transparently; every investment it makes is detailed online.

Other funds might copy those structures, but would struggle to mimic the Nordic values that underpin them. Yngve Slyngstad, its boss, says growth came “faster than anyone had envisaged”, and that a culture of political trust made it uncontroversial to save as much as possible. A budgetary rule stops the government from drawing down more than the fund’s expected annual returns (set at 4% a year). The capital, in theory, is never touched. Martin Skancke, who used to oversee the fund’s operations from the finance ministry, attributes the trust the institution enjoys to relatively high levels of equality and cultural homogeneity. It also helps that many rural areas recall poverty just two generations ago.

Consider this your regular reminder that the “resource curse” is not a universal phenomenon. See also Botswana, the United States, Chile, Canada, and Australia.

More on this here.

The Long Peace Since WWII, Visualized

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Fewer people are dying in violent conflict (both in absolute figures and as a proportion of the total population of humans) than at any time since World War II. It is hard to believe this amid the flood of images and stories of violent death (state-sanctioned or otherwise) in countries like Mexico, the United States, Burundi, or Syria.

Kenyan Intervention in (al-Shabab dominated) Southern Somalia

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The ICG has an excellent new report on the state of the the Kenyan military intervention in Somalia.

The pressing issues raised in the report include economic, political and social concerns:

The slow pace of the military operation and the high cost of keeping troops in the field are the main reasons behind Nairobi’s desire to operate under AMISOM command. The treasury would then not have to pay the full cost of the campaign. It is estimated that Linda Nchi is costing the government at least KSh 210 million ($2.8 million) per month in personnel costs alone in a year of a record KSh 236 billion ($3.1 billion) budget deficit. If the interven- tion’s cost is not contained, already high inflation will spiral, and local discontent could become more serious…..

The intervention in Somalia is likely to have a complex impact on Kenyan Somalis’ political positions, because their attitude toward it is not straightforward. The government’s desire to establish a buffer zone between the border and the rest of Somalia privileges the Ogaden, the majority Kenyan-Somali clan. The possibility of a semi-autonomous state in the south of Somalia politically dominated by Ogaden may not be favoured by the minority, marginalised clans of north-eastern Kenya, such as the Ajuran and Degodia…..

Views within the ethnic Somali and wider Muslim community regarding the war are mixed but predominantly critical. Even those now mildly supportive could easily become hostile, especially if things go badly wrong, and civilian deaths mount. The notion that the war is popular within the Muslim community is wishful thinking, and the potential to exacerbate already worrying radicalisation in the country is very real. The police and other security services have shown some restraint in bigger cities, but there have been numerous reports of abuses in North Eastern Province.