Chinese Official Highlights Importance of Establishing Global South Center to Support Africa’s Dev’t

Addis Ababa, January 19, 2025 (ENA) ---- China is dedicated to establishing a Global South Center and encouraging interactions between stakeholders from both the north and the south to engage in policy discussions, President (Minister) of Development Research Center of the State Council of China, LU Hao remarked.

Ethiopia’s Finance Minister, Ahmed Shide has welcomed LU Hao, President (Minister) of Development Research Center of the State Council of China and its delegate.

In their discussion LU Hao underscored that during the 3rd FOCAC summit the Chines government encouraged Think Tank group dialogue for public policy development in Africa.

For this, he said, the Chinese government organizes a close door symposium in Egypt to make a policy dialogue on how to strengthen China’s cooperation with Africa.

He also mentioned that China is dedicated to establishing a Global South Center and encouraging interactions between stakeholders from both the north and the south to engage in policy discussions and share experiences aimed at fostering change and development for developing countries.

The Chinese official also noted that, during the FOCAC summit, African nations reached a consensus to advance development in sectors such as industry, information technology, artificial intelligence, agricultural transformation, and market supply chains.

In this context, the Global South Center is anticipated to formulate policy frameworks through extensive policy dialogues to support the development of African nations.

Minister of Finance, Ahmed Shide for his part stated that the establishment of the Global South Research Center is important for global development.

He said, we learned and benefited much from China’s growth underscoring that China’s growth is the growth of Africa which leverages huge finance and engineering capacity for the economic development of African nations.  

Ahmed mentioned the Ethiopian experience that during the past 15 years the country implemented several infrastructural, manufacturing and development projects by Chinese financial facilities. In addition, Ethiopian also benefited from China’s engineering which significantly enhanced Ethiopian technical capacities. 

Minister Ahmed also mentioned the contribution of Ethiopian projects for regional economic development. In this case, he sated some projects such as the Ethiopia-Djibouti railway project, the hydropower generating and transmission lines, express ways and water supply projects which benefited neighboring countries.

Finally, Ahmed underscored that Chinese economic cooperation and partnership with Ethiopia and Africa in general has played great role for their development, insisting the Chinese government to continue its financial and engineering cooperation and support to Africa.