In 2023, Jamlick Mwangi Kariuki decided to return to China to continue his studies after earning a bachelor’s degree at Beijing Jiaotong University in 2021.
In the years between, Kariuki worked as an assistant engineer in his home country, Kenya. His responsibilities ranged from inspecting tracks on the Mombasa-Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway (SGR), a flagship project of the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative, to planning, railroad management and operation. However, a hunger for more expertise and knowledge drove him back to the same university in Beijing, where he is currently enrolled in a master’s degree in civil engineering.
The 26-year-old Kenyan is just one of the more than 50,000 African students studying in China each year. China has become a preferred study destination for many young Africans, according to Hu Changchun, head of the Chinese mission to the African Union.
China has trained more than 220,000 personnel of various types for African countries, taking into account their actual needs, said Bai Bin, an official of China International Development Cooperation Agency (CIDCA), at a recent press briefing.
China’s cooperation with Africa in human resource development has been very fruitful. It has not only helped African countries train a large number of talents but also improved their capacity for independent development, empowering them to maintain the momentum of sustainable development, said Bai.
How China acts
From promoting the Juncao technology at the China-Rwanda Agriculture Technology Demonstration Center and providing vocational training at Luban Workshops in different parts of Africa to sponsoring education programs in Chinese universities and institutes, China has been boosting cooperation on talent development in Africa through various methods.
In September 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced that China would establish the Institute of South-South Cooperation and Development. In April 2016, the institute was officially established at Peking University in Beijing to share governance experience and cultivate top-ranking talents in governance for developing countries.
“Over the past eight years, through the Institute of South-South Cooperation and Development, we have trained 400 high-caliber talents for more than 70 countries, more than half of whom came from Africa,” said Bai.
“Some students are now high-ranking officials in their governments, and others are elites in various industries,” he added. “It is a very good example of the concept of South-South cooperation.”
In September 2018, China announced eight major initiatives during the Beijing summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), with one committed to improving capacity-building activities in Africa. Under the initiative, Beijing decided to establish 10 Luban Workshops and build a China-Africa Innovation Center that aims to promote innovation and entrepreneurship of youth, among others.
The China-Africa Cooperation Vision 2035 was adopted at the 8th ministerial conference of FOCAC in Dakar, Senegal in November 2021. China said it supports Africa in developing education, enhancing the education level for all Africans, women, children and youth in particular, and cultivating young leaders and high-caliber technical talents in all areas.
On August 24, 2023, at the China-Africa Leaders’ Dialogue, Xi announced China’s launch of the Plan for China-Africa Cooperation on Talent Development. It stressed that cooperation on talent development between China and Africa should be oriented toward modernizing governance capacity, promoting economic and social development, enhancing efficiency through scientific and technological innovation and improving people’s well-being.
Cooperation on capacity building in technology transfer, education and training should be strengthened to support the realization of goals, such as human resource development, set out in the First Ten-Year Implementation Plan of the African Union’s Agenda 2063, according to the plan.
China’s human resource cooperation with Africa, covering a wide range of targets and with different types and forms, has reaped fruitful results, Bai said in a summary of the three characteristics of the cooperation.
Responding to Africa’s needs
Africa’s total population has now crossed 1.5 billion, and its working-age population (20-64 years) will increase from 883 million in 2024 to 1.6 billion in 2050 and constitute almost 25 percent of the global working-age population, according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa.
Africa is believed to still be in the early stages of realizing its population’s potential, and it is urgently needed to enhance the labor skills of the youth, increase effective employment and turn population potential into a real force for development.
African countries are generally facing a shortage of local talent and urgently need to cooperate with China in talent cultivation, seek development paths suitable for their national conditions, and accelerate the realization of industrialization and agricultural modernization, Zhang Yongpeng, a research fellow at the Institute of West Asian and African Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the People’s Daily newspaper.
At the China-Africa Educational Cooperation Seminar in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in May, Samuel Kifle, president of Addis Ababa University, called for enhanced China-Africa cooperation in education within the framework of FOCAC.
“We Africans can learn from what China has achieved over the last 40 years in fostering fast economic development through boosting productivity, innovation, infrastructure development and creating a responsible government,” Kifle told Xinhua.