Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told African leaders on Tuesday that India will make loans to nurture economic growth on the continent where China is already a big step ahead. The south Asian country will notably offer African nations $5 billion (3.6 billion euros) in credit lines over three years, he told a trade summit here.
“Africa possesses all the prerequisites to become a major growth pole of the world in the 21st century. We will work with Africa to enable it to realise this potential,” Singh said. “I’m happy to announce that India will continue to support efforts at infrastructure development, regional integration and capacity building and human ressources development in Africa,” he said.
He said India will offer five billion dollars of credit lines to African nations over the next three years. At the last India-Africa summit in New Delhi in 2008, India offered 5.4 billion dollars in concessionary credit lines over a five-year period. Some of the human resources projects India has set up on the continent and plans to develop further include the India Africa Institute of Foreign Trade in Uganda, the India-Africa Institute of Information Technology in Ghana, the India Africa Diamond Institute in Botswana, and the India-Africa Institute of Education, Planning and Administration in Burundi.
“In the three years since the first India-Africa summit, Indian trade and investment in Africa have significantly increased,” noted Alex Vines of the London-based think-tank Chatham House in a report last week. Last year, India’s imports from Africa were worth $20.7 billion, compared with $18.7 billion the previous year, and its exports stood at $10.3 billion the same year. India’s investment in Africa is mainly in the private sector, notably in telecommunications, pharmaceuticals and manufacturing. But those numbers are small compared with the Chinese presence.
China has mainly built infrastructure projects in exchange for access to resources, and its bilateral trade with the continent in 2010 totalled $126.9 billion, according to official figures. Africa, despite being home to most of the world’s poorest countries, is richly endowed with minerals, oil and other natural resources. India has been looking to diversify its energy sources and reduce its dependency on the Middle East which supplies two-thirds of its energy imports.
