By Yinka Adegoke
From the article:
OPIC is dead. Long live OPIC.
In the last few years of US president Obama’s administration, there were increasingly loud calls for the government to get rid of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), the development agency which encourages investment by US companies in Africa.
The problem, as the critics saw it, was the four-decades old agency had become “institutionally ill-suited to its mission and harms poor people around the world,” said a 2015 paper from CEI, a libertarian Washington DC think tank, which also claimed OPIC projects end up “enriching the politically connected.”
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So what changed the US government’s mind on this?
One word: China.
“Part of the motivation has been China which is very active in a lot of markets,” says Todd Moss, an analyst at the Center for Global Development and a long-time supporter for reform in the US development finance. “This is an attempt to modernize our foreign policy tools.”
Before now, the Trump administration had only ever expressed concern for seemingly naive African leaders who were being misled by China with what some call its “debt trap diplomacy.”
Read the full article here.
