The G20 Summit was held in South Africa from November 22 to 23, 2025. This is the first time the G20 summit will be held on the African continent.
African countries’ aspirations for independent development were deeply integrated into the global development agenda, and the voices of the Global South were echoed throughout the Johannesburg Nasrec Expo Centre. This summit was a victory for multilateralism, a victory for the Global South, and above all a victory for Africa.
During the summit, China and South Africa jointly launched the “Cooperation Initiative to Support Africa’s Modernization.” This initiative will promote the traditional friendly cooperation between China and Africa and make an important contribution to global development challenges. This demonstrates China and Africa’s firm determination and responsibility to move forward hand in hand in the new era, injects strong momentum into the development and revitalization of the African continent, and charts a new blueprint for building a China-Africa community with a shared future.
Ten years ago, on December 4, 2015, at the Johannesburg Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), Chinese President Xi Jinping announced that China was ready to jointly implement 10 cooperation plans with Africa, focusing on helping Africa address three major development bottlenecks: infrastructure backwardness, lack of human resources, and lack of finance. These efforts were aimed at accelerating industrialization and agricultural modernization and achieving self-reliant and sustainable development. This is the first time that China has explicitly proposed to help accelerate Africa’s industrialization and agricultural modernization, and heralds a new phase of China-Africa cooperation.
Over the past decade, China has kept its promise, continuously expanded investment in Africa, and achieved fruitful results in China-Africa cooperation in areas such as industrialization and agricultural modernization. From the 10 cooperation plans to the 8 major actions and the 10 partnership actions of the new era, China’s cooperation mechanism with Africa has been continuously refined and the area of cooperation has steadily expanded. China has provided hundreds of billions of RMB in aid to Africa, implemented numerous major projects benefiting its people, and created millions of jobs in Africa. With Chinese aid, Africa’s infrastructure, including railways, highways, and ports, has been significantly improved. Industrialization is progressing steadily and agricultural technology is continually improving. All this fully demonstrates China’s sincere desire and practical achievements in supporting Africa’s modernization.
The “Cooperative Initiative to Support Africa’s Modernization,” jointly proposed by China and South Africa, inherits and develops an important proposition of President Xi Jinping. This reflects the continuity and stability of China’s policy towards Africa, and highlights the characteristics of China-Africa cooperation that keeps pace with the times and pursues pragmatic innovation. The initiative establishes a comprehensive and multi-layered cooperation framework, based on Africa’s actual needs and in line with the laws of modernization. Its core content can be summarized as six main principles and six main directions.
Regarding cooperation principles, the initiative has six key principles: justice and equity, openness and win-win, people first, diversity and inclusion, and sustainable development underpinned by peace and security. It explicitly respects the sovereignty and independent choices of African countries, adheres to non-interference in internal affairs, supports “African solutions to African problems,” advocates an open and inclusive model of cooperation, and ensures that the benefits of cooperation truly reach African peoples.
In terms of directions for cooperation, the initiative focuses on six key areas of African modernization: The first aims to achieve fair and equitable modernization by adhering to the principles of “African-led, domestically owned and African-led”, helping African countries explore development paths suitable to their own conditions, strengthening exchanges on governance experience and conceptual alignment, and promoting the reform of the international financial system. Second, we aim to achieve open and win-win modernization by supporting African countries and China to conclude economic partnership agreements for joint development, increasing the added value of Africa’s mineral resources, deepening industrial and supply chain cooperation, promoting infrastructure investment, implementing innovation cooperation, and promoting quality cooperation. The third aims to achieve modernization that puts people first by supporting the development of regional value chains, with a focus on food security, health, poverty reduction and other livelihood areas. Fourth, it aims to achieve diverse and inclusive modernization by strengthening people-to-people exchanges and mutual learning between civilizations, expanding cooperation in fields such as education, youth development and women’s empowerment, and promoting harmonious coexistence between different civilizations. Fifth, it aims to achieve green modernization by supporting Africa’s green and low-carbon transformation, strengthening cooperation in areas such as clean energy, disaster prevention and mitigation, and helping Africa achieve sustainable development. Sixth, it aims to achieve modernization underpinned by peace and security by implementing early cooperation under the Global Security Initiative, supporting African countries in building collective security mechanisms, and supporting the creation of special arrangements on UN Security Council reform to meet Africa’s aspirations as a priority.
The initiative combines the spirit of Ubuntu and Pan-Africanism with a vision of a community with a common future for humanity and five principles of peaceful coexistence, and represents an innovative quest to integrate African philosophy and Chinese wisdom into international consensus. This provides new opportunities for Africa’s modernization efforts and serves as a vivid exercise in building a China-Africa community with a shared future. First, this initiative enriches the implications of a Sino-African community with a shared future in a new era. As the first multilateral initiative jointly launched by China and Africa to modernize Africa, it will elevate China-Africa relations to a new height from traditional economic cooperation to comprehensive modernization partnership, and promote the upgrading of China-Africa cooperation from project alignment to strategic synergy. Second, this initiative provides a comprehensive solution for Africa to meet its development challenges. Unlike traditional aid models, it focuses on the root causes of Africa’s development problems and strives to strengthen the endogenous drivers of African economies through measures such as industrial chain cooperation, infrastructure construction, and capacity building. Third, this initiative sets a model for Global South cooperation. By advocating the principles of broad consultation, co-construction and shared benefits, and a philosophy of openness and inclusiveness, it embodies the spirit of solidarity and cooperation between the Global South, provides the international community with a new paradigm for supporting Africa’s development, and contributes to building a more just and equitable global governance system. This fourth initiative provides an important pathway for sharing the achievements of China’s modernization. By sharing its modernization experience, China will not only facilitate the flow of technology, capital and talent to Africa and accelerate Africa’s development, but also create conditions for Chinese enterprises to explore markets and achieve mutual benefits and win-win results. This cooperation model, which emphasizes two-way commitment, will enable China and Africa to empower each other in the modernization process and jointly drive the wave of modernization in the Global South.
Nigeria is one of Africa’s major economies with the largest population, an important force in Africa’s modernization process, and an important partner in China-Africa cooperation. The joint efforts of China and Nigeria will undoubtedly provide a strong impetus to the implementation of this initiative and greatly contribute to Africa’s modernization. To this end, the two sides should take advantage of complementary advantages, focus on key areas, deepen cooperation in infrastructure and interconnectivity, strengthen cooperation in agriculture and food security, advance industrial chain and digital economic cooperation, strengthen livelihood improvement and capacity building cooperation, expand green development and ecological conservation, explore practical cooperation in peace and security, and build a model of China-Africa cooperation.
Looking to the future, as long as China and Africa uphold the principles of sincerity, performance, affinity and good faith, and adhere to the principles of mutually beneficial and win-win cooperation, we will definitely make the blueprint for the Africa Modernization Support Cooperation Initiative a reality. This will bring more fruitful results to China-Africa cooperation along the path of modernization, inject further impetus to global development, and jointly write a new chapter in building a community with a shared future for mankind.
Mr. Dunhai is the Chinese ambassador to Nigeria.
