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Raghu Dayal
The world’s fastest-growing continent, Africa, has grown faster over the past decade than East Asia ( as per The Economist).

It is no longer the mysterious and forbidding Dark Continent; it seeks to stride past the horrors of Darfur, the persistence of HIV/AIDS or Ebola, the failure to end famine and civil wars – McKinsey (2010) found it to be Lions on the Move.

In end-1990, only three African countries had democracies; the number now is 25. Foreign direct investment in the continent tripled, from $15 billion in 2002 to $46 billion in 2012. Real income per person increased by more than 30 percent.

Sub-Saharan Africa has made huge leaps: secondary-school enrolment grew by 48 percent between 2000 and 2008; malaria deaths declined by 30 percent, and HIV infections by 74 percent.

Life expectancy increased by 10 percent; child mortality rates declined steeply. By 2017, nearly 30 percent of households are expected to have a television set, an almost five-fold increase over ten years, and consumer spending is set to almost double.

Mobile phones are as ubiquitous as they are in India. Kenya-based Safaricom accounts for 95 percent of country’s mobile money market. Ericsson estimates the mobile phones will increase to 930 million by 2019, almost one per African. Smartphones are likely to push internet penetration to 50 percent within a decade.

The ongoing four-day India-Africa Forum Summit (IAFS) III being hosted in New Delhi, unlike the previous IAFS I (New Delhi, 2008) and IAFS II (Addis Ababa, 2011), is indeed ambitious, with representation from all 54 African countries, including heads of state and the governments of 40 of them, besides the African Union, accompanied also by about 400 business delegates.

The summit affords India and Africa an opportunity to reinforce their shared identity, enabling them to usher in bonds of understanding and partnership. New worldwide concerns of terror and climate change beckon the summit to jointly grapple with the challenges.

Like diverse India, Africa is too big to follow one script. The majority of the continent’s billion people are stalked by disease and hunger.

The spread of wealth is uneven, notwithstanding sporadic signs of a break from the stereotype. An IMF survey reveals that six of the African countries (Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda) recorded an annual average GDP growth of over 5 percent during 1995-2010 and a per capita GDP annual increase of over 3 percent.

Rwanda has jumped to 32nd in World Bank’s global ranking for Ease of Doing Business. Burkina Faso today produces gold; natural gas flows off the Tanzania coast; Mozambique has a promise of a big source of energy – coal, oil and gas.

Ever since the arrival of Cecil Rhodes more than a century ago, local African miners have generated immense wealth, commodities generating one-third of Africa’s GDP growth. Natural resources make up over a quarter of export revenues for half of the 45 countries in sub-Sahara.

Zambia thrives on copper, Botswana on diamond mining. In 2013, Kenya discovered niobium, rare earth deposits estimated at $62 billion. Angola is rich in diamonds, Nigeria in oil.

Oil and gas fuel the rising aspirations – take a 2012 discovery of oil around Lake Turkana in north-western Kenya, of 3.5 billion oil barrels by Lake Albert in Uganda, and also on the other side of the lake, in Congo. Ethiopia is exploring furiously, as is South Sudan along its border with Kenya.

Nigeria churns out about 2 million barrels of crude oil a day. Africa’s biggest wind farm is being built east of Lake Turkana at a cost of $1 billion. South Africa recently inaugurated a $640-million concentrated solar power plant (CSP), one of the six among world’s 10-biggest CSPs being built.

India extends duty-free tariff preference, encompassing 98 percent of tariff lines for African exports. Its bilateral trade, up from $5 billion in 2000-2001 to $70 billion in 2012-13, is projected to be around $100 billion by end-2015.

India’s EXIM Bank had 129 lines of credit in operation until end-2013, amounting to $6 billion for projects in 45 African countries. Indian conglomerates such as the Tatas, Reliance and Essar, automobile companies such as Mahindra, Bajaj and TVS, and telecommunication companies, also ONGC and Bharti Airtel have a long-term vision for Africa.

India’s approved cumulative investments in sectors such as FMCG, mining and minerals, telecommunications, construction and projects during 1996-2013 are estimated to be $37,8 billion.

Africa offers a vast scope to Indian companies to explore mutually beneficial sustainable cooperation in IT, agriculture, mining, food processing, besides a gamut of infrastructure, consumer durables and services sectors. Human resource development continues to be high on the agenda. The Indian government has offered scholarships to 22 000 African students.

Albeit, until 1999, India’s trade with Africa exceeded China’s, since 2009, China has been Africa’s largest trading partner. Chinese trade with Africa, rising from $12 billion in 2002 to $198 billion in 2012, is projected to be four times bigger than India’s by 2015. A Nairobi-based economic expert estimates that there are about 2 500 Chinese firms in Africa. An estimated 1million Chinese are now resident in Africa.

The main thoroughfare in Senegalese capital, Dakar, is now known as Boulevard Mao. Yet, typical of quiet resentment brewing against Chinese incursions, the Governor of the Nigerian Central Bank, recently excoriated the Chinese for exuding “a whiff of colonialism”, and called upon “Africans to wake up to the realities of their romance with China”.

From 1 billion now, African population it is set to double by 2050. Sub-Saharan Africa is projected to be home to one-fourth of the world’s below-25 population by end-2020.

With a fast-growing middle class, around 100 million Africans have an income of $3 000 a year. African economy is projected to expand from a GDP of $2 trillion to $2,6 trillion by 2020, with a consumer base amounting to $1,4 trillion. About 40 percent of Africans are city-dwellers now, up from 30 percent a generation ago; by 2025, the share is likely to be 50 percent.

Eastern and southern Africa host large population of people from India. India needs to be circumspect that in no way it falls prey to a whiff of hegemony; its commercial and industrial entrepreneurs must eschew temptations of transient gains.

They need to be true partners in the continent of hope and promise. Rights activists brand some Indian investments in Africa as instances of land grab. There are allegations of some Indian investors entering Africa to make a quick buck.

India and Africa need to scan their infirmities and coalesce their strengths, to mutual gain. They need to take on the difficult jobs of building infrastructure, rooting out corruption and clearing the tangle of government regulation that holds them back.

The author is senior fellow, Asian Institute of Transport Development.