IPNEWS: Washington D.C. will be the site of high-level meetings in December, and the question is being asked in African capitals: who will be on the list for an invitation?

Ahead of this planned summit, W. Gyude Moore, a former minister of public works in Liberia, including other experts in Washington D.C. are optimistic that the planned U.S.-Africa summit will yield much-needed capital investments to the continent.

Gyude Moore speaking at the just ended U.S. Africa Business summit in Morocco this week, stated that Joe Biden schedules a summit with African leaders will seek to renew the push to U.S. investment in the African continent

He stated that the Joe Biden administration on both perception and rhetoric has been better than Trump’s.

“Whether it’s the speech that Secretary [of State Antony] Blinken gave in Nigeria or the Africa strategy that is being developed, the US is saying all the right things about Africa. But the Trump administration was such an anomaly,” Moore said.

Although not much has been done by Washington so far, Moore said he thought the US was “still attempting to come up with an adequate response to Africa’s infrastructure deficit”.

Moore, who is now with the Centre for Global Development, also said that PGII “appears like a rebranding” of Build Back Better World (B3W), which the G7 launched last year in Britain but flopped in the US Congress.

Another expert on U.S. African policy, Hannah Ryder, chief executive officer of Development Reimagined, a Beijing-based consultancy, said Africa needed investment and would welcome finance for infrastructure. “So, a worldwide initiative of US$600 billion seems of a better scale than what has been discussed before, albeit still limited,” she said.

But she said that given the experience with initiatives like Prosper Africa and climate financing, the US’ and G7’s collective track record was poor. “In this sense, new initiatives can damage the G7’s credibility, meaning the G7 should be cautious when pitching this as a ‘win’ or ‘counter’ to China or others,” Ryder said.

Adhere Cavince, an international relations analyst based in Nairobi, said a big question in many African capitals is who will be on the list of invites to Biden’s summit. At the president’s Summit for Democracy last December in Washington, “just about a quarter of African countries were invited”, primarily because of concerns about the nations’ values and commitment to democracy, Cavince said.

“This is dramatically different from China’s engagement with Africa through avenues like the Forum on China Africa Cooperation, usually attended by nearly all African countries,” he said.

There are growing suspicion that the planned U.S. Africa Summit may be another attempt by the West to counter China’s influence.

Experts have predicted that the US aims to pump billions of investment dollars into Africa in a renewed commitment to counter China’s growing influence on the continent.

China overtook the US as Africa’s biggest trading partner in 2009, and now Washington will partner with the Group of 7 wealthiest nations to mobilize the investment.

US President Joe Biden announced on Wednesday that he would host African leaders at a summit scheduled for December 13-15 to discuss pressing problems including food security and climate change. He said the gathering would “demonstrate the United States’ enduring commitment to Africa and will underscore the importance of US-Africa relations and increased cooperation on shared global priorities”.

The most recent high-level US-Africa summit was held eight years ago during President Barack Obama’s administration, with leaders from 50 African countries attending.

Beijing’s equivalent, the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, is held every three years. In November, the Senegalese capital of Dakar played host to the forum, with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who attended via video link, pledging to advance US$40 billion in funding and promising to increase the value of imports from Africa to US$300 billion in the next three years.

Wednesday’s announcement was made simultaneously in virtual remarks by US Vice-President Kamala Harris to the US-Africa Business Summit in Marrakech, Morocco.

The United States “is committed to bring to bear all the tools at our disposal, including development financing, grants and technical assistance, and support for legal and regulatory reforms – all to help our African partners thrive”, Harris said.

US officials will use the Marrakech meeting to “work to advance Washington’s new global infrastructure initiative” and “to mobilize hundreds of billions of dollars for high-quality, sustainable infrastructure investment”, she said.

In Germany last month, Biden proposed a US$600 billion initiative with the G7 to build infrastructure through the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII). Of that amount, Washington aims to mobilize US$200 billion for PGII over the next five years through grants, financing and private sector investments.

Beijing has funded and built huge infrastructure projects – such as ports, railways, highways and power dams – in Africa under its transcontinental Belt and Road Initiative. Examples include a US$4.7 billion railway in Kenya running from the Port of Mombasa to the capital Nairobi with an extension to Naivasha, a town in Central Rift Valley. It built a similar railway stretching from Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa to Djibouti. In Djibouti, Beijing has also funded large port and free-trade zone projects and built its first overseas naval military base.

The US has accused China of putting developing countries into “debt traps” by offering unsustainable loans for BRI projects. Beijing has disputed the charge, saying: “The so-called Chinese debt trap is pure disinformation and a narrative trap created by those who do not hope to see China-Africa cooperation pick up speed.

XN Iraki, an economics professor at the University of Nairobi, said the US was more visible on “soft issues” like democracy, health, human rights and education but not “hard things” like infrastructure, a gap China easily fills. “While we can point out the ports, airports, highways or rails that China has built on the continent, not the US,” Iraki said.

He said the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment was a response to BRI, whose visibility might have rattled Washington. “Like other US projects that reach the grass roots, PGII would have to reach this level to countervail BRI,” he said.

“Will PGII focus on neglected rural areas or countries that China has kept away from? Are there any strings attached? How much transparency will be there? We hope the details will emerge at the summit.”

This is not the first time the US has tried to counter China in Africa. During President Donald Trump’s administration, the US unveiled the Prosper Africa Initiative, but Trump left office before any major projects began. Prosper Africa’s goal was to increase two-way trade and investment between the United States and African countries.

Alice Albright, chief executive of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, an American foreign aid agency, is leading a delegation from 10 US government departments and agencies at the Morocco meeting. The group also includes investors who collectively manage more than a trillion dollars in assets.

Albright said since the launch of Prosper Africa two years ago, the US government has supported 800 two-way trade and investment deals in 45 countries in Africa, worth an estimated US$50 billion.

Concrete pillars are erected during the construction of a highway in the Nairobi Expressway in 2021. The project was undertaken by the China Road and Bridge Corporation on a public-private partnership basis.