China has been putting more and more money into Africa, in projects rang­ing from infra­struc­ture improve­ments to profit busi­nesses. That has caused some con­cern in the West, as some fear it will limit their inter­ests in the continent.

One project that the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment set up is a China-Africa Devel­op­ment Fund which has 5 bil­lion dol­lars in the bank to fund joint busi­nesses. An arti­cle that we found in All Africa explains some of the work the fund does and some frus­tra­tion in find­ing good projects due to lack of infrastructure.

From this Busi­ness Day story, writer Hopewell Rade­betells tells us more about the fund.

The fund estab­lished offices for the South­ern African Devel­op­ment Com­mu­nity (Sadc) in Johan­nes­burg in March . Since its estab­lish­ment in June 2007, the fund has facil­i­tated more than 20 invest­ments in Africa, amount­ing to nearly 400m .

The fund was estab­lished by Pres­i­dent Hu Jin tao after the 2006 Bei­jing Sum­mit of the Forum on China-Africa Co-operation.

Wang says the fund is speak­ing to the embassies and trade offi­cials of African states rep­re­sented in China to encour­age them to take the infor­ma­tion to their respec­tive countries.

The fund is find­ing it increas­ingly chal­leng­ing to fund infra­struc­ture pro­grammes in most African states because of the lack of essen­tial facil­i­ties, includ­ing sound telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions sys­tems, says Wang.

“We find that they (prospec­tive busi­ness part­ners) expect coun­tries to have basic tech­nol­ogy and suf­fi­ciently oper­a­tional ports, air­port and roads …unfor­tu­nately these facil­i­ties are not nec­es­sar­ily avail­able in some coun­tries on the con­ti­nent,” he says.

Liu Xiaolei, the fund’s Sadc head , says it is look­ing at sup­port­ing major regional infra­struc­ture ven­tures such as the envis­aged elec­tric­ity trans­mis­sion lines between SA and Mozam­bique, SA and Zam­bia, as well as Zam­bia and Botswana and Namibia and Zimbabwe.