The third India-Africa Forum Summit with the theme—Partners in Progress: Towards a Dynamic and Transformative Development Agenda—was hosted in New Delhi on 29 October 2015. The forum was formed in 2008.
The summit called for transformative relationship in the future adopting the Delhi Declaration. The 2015 India-Africa Framework for Strategic Cooperation and Plan of Action also got approval at the summit with the focus on transforming shared aspirations into reality.
India’s Role in Africa
Development Assistance: India is an important ally in the development of Africa along next only to the United Nations, Japan and China. It has been contributed around 17.4 billion US dollars in promoting developmental activities in Africa since 2008.
Moreover, India offered 600 million US dollars of grant assistance in the 2015 summit. It included 10 million US dollars of India-Africa Health Fund and 100 million dollars of India-Africa Development Fund.
Education: The Indian government awarded 50,000 scholarships to African students in the summit for availing higher education in India. India initiated the Pan- African e-network project for 54 African nations in 2007 to promote tele-education, e-commerce, telemedicine, e-governance, resource mapping, infotainment and meteorological services.
Civil Wars and Conflicts: India also took part in four UN peacekeeping missions— Ivory Coast (since 2004), Congo (2005), Sudan and South Sudan (2005) and Liberia (2007) and is a major contributor to UN Peacekeeping operations in Africa.
Africa’s Relevancy for India
Source of minerals: Africa, with its rich mineral resources, offers ample opportunities to build trade relationships. India’s trade relationship with Africa covers crude oil imports in addition to gold and silver. May 2015, Nigeria replaced Saudi Arabia as the largest oil exporter to India. Presently, India imports around 26 per cent of its crude oil from Africa with Nigeria and Angola being the major contributors.
The strengthening relationship of India with Africa, in oil exploration and production, could be witnessed from the presence of ONGC Videsh Limited (OVL), international arm of ONGC in five African countries— Libya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Sudan and South Sudan.
Moreover, India’s association with Africa, the next global provider of rare earth minerals, in exploring rare earth minerals will be fruitful to curb China’s dominance in this strategic sector, which forms the basis of modern electronics industry.
Market for Indian made goods: Africa in present times has become one of the major destinations for Indian-made goods due to improvement in lifestyle and standards of living in the continent.
In a report issued by the World Bank, Africa’s GNI is higher than India, and the GNI per capita of a dozen African countries are higher than China.
India’s production is expected to increase over and above the consumption level under the Make in India initiative and, thus, Africa could be the best partner for India in future.
Many African countries come in the least developing countries (LDCs) category and India’s decision to extend preferential treatment to LDCs in trade in services in the WTO can enhance the mineral resource-led trade momentum to even the services sector in the coming years.
In the last 15 years, there has been an increase of 20 times in the trade with Africa, but it was much less than the specified target of 100 billion US dollars set for 2015.
Even this 100 billion US dollars trade target of India is much less in comparison to 250 billion US dollars trade partnership of China with Africa.
India’s chances of achieving the UN Security Council permanent membership will be further strengthened with more than a quarter of UN members being representatives from African Union of 54 countries.
It would not have been possible for India, without the support of African nations, to get elected to the UN Security Council for seven terms since 1945 and in important organisations like UNICEF, UN Habitat, World Food Program, etc.
Areas of Common Interest
Demography: Even after having demographic variation in terms of size, India and Africa share many commonalities as follows:
• Both the regions share equal population of around 130 crore forming one-third of the global population.
• Both the regions share similar proportion of young population with Africa having 200 million people in the age group 15 and 24 and India with 18 per cent of the population as young
• India and Africa share similarity in terms of ethnic and linguistic diversity also. In the context of large youth population and increasing rate of unemployment, India and Africa can learn from each other’s experiences and can work together for development of desired skills and reap demographic dividends.
Security: Considering the expanded ambit of security, India and Africa share similar concerns with threats emanating from both internal and external sources in various forms such as unemployment, hunger, poverty, insurgency, drug trafficking, money laundering, human trafficking, terrorism, diseases, piracy, etc.
New International Order: To promote democratic global order, it is necessary to carry out structural and procedural reforms in the global political and financial institutions such as the United Nations, International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Deeper engagement are required between the two partners to achieve this objective.
Conclusion
While the factors considered to be binding the world politics till the 1990s were the Non-Alignment Movement (NAM), the resistance to cold-war politics along with racism, the modern age Indo-Africa relationship is differentiated by bilateral and multilateral cooperation with focus on trade, people-to-people exchanges, investments and broad-based development aspirations.
The leadership in India and Africa should immediately take notice that their people are their true resources, as realised in the Delhi Declaration and go all out in their endeavour for improving their living standards as laid down in the UN Sustainable Development Goals.