Characteristics of China-Africa health collaboration:The case of Democratic Republic of Congo / 中国卫生政策研究

ABSTRACT

China’s relationship with Africa has gained worldwide attention, with substantial scale and wide range of investment and development assistance over the past decades. We argue in this paper that China-Africa health collaboration has four main characteristicsChina has a vague definition of the Development Fund for Health;there is no single development agency within Chinese government; the Chinese government is very responsive to re-quests from local government and most of the health programs are co-developed by the two governments;and China's private investment in Africa merges into the field of public development and plays an important role. Thus, China-Af-rica health collaboration has two major problemsresource mismatch and restricted impact. The case of Congo shows that in order to increase the effectiveness of China-Africa health collaboration and to make better use of the advantages of a complex system, decision-makers need to consider the bottom-up innovation and integration with local systems when making policies. They also need to avoid a scattered structure and inefficiency brought about by a complex sys-tem in order to ensure balanced consensus-building mechanisms among all stakeholders in China-Africa health collab-oration.