China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI): Mapping Economic Escalation and Development Expansion Opportunities for Africa

Abstract

The recent ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) conference, Beijing 2019, demonstrated the increasing politico economic engagement of China amid African states. China’s BRI was initiated in 2013, focused on the endowment of infrastructure developments, while forecasting opportunities to African states to concentrate on the economic escalation and development expansion on the continent. In-turn, African leadership focused over the infrastructural growth as the major stake underneath state and continental progress. Hence, demands considerable economic sustenance of China, however, also offers vulnerabilities to indefensible debits and rising dependency of African states. This research article centers Sino-African relations, focusing on the possibility of BRI, for economic escalation and development expansion opportunities towards Africa; with anticipation of obtaining reply to some of the queries related to the subject; while suggesting ways to manage future challenges of such initiative.