Mozambique’s prime minister wrapped a two-day trip to Beijing with the announcement of a sizable Chinese donation and interest forgiveness on loans up to 2024, reports news outlet Club of Mozambique.
Mozambican Prime Minister Benvinda Levi arrived in Beijing on Saturday for a two-day working visit, representing her country at the Global Women’s Summit and holding meetings with Chinese leadership on the sidelines.
Her conversations with President Xi Jinping proved especially fruitful, the prime minister announcing after the meeting that China had agreed to donate 100 million yuan (US$14 million) to Mozambique and to forgive the interest on loans granted to the country up to 2024.
As of this March, China held more than 14 percent of Mozambique’s external debt, making China the country’s largest bilateral creditor, with a stock of US$1.383 billion, according to Mozambican government data.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries, the Asian giant among the first to establish formal diplomatic relations when Mozambique gained its independence in 1975.
[See more: China cements status as a key trade partner for Mozambique]
The meeting also served as an opportunity to share Mozambique’s two main instruments of governance, the Government Five-Year Plan (PQG) and the Economic and Social Plan and State Budget (PESOE). “Together we identified some areas for follow-up,” Levi told the press.
The two sides agreed to focus investments on agriculture and its value chain, technical and vocational training, and health. Chinese support already enabled the construction of Mozambique’s largest polytechnic institute, a US$15 billion project inaugurated last July, and the Mozambican government is seeking further investment to develop schools in other parts of the country.
Chinese investments in Mozambique, estimated at US$9.5 billion last April by then-Chinese ambassador to Mozambique Wang Hejun, tend to be concentrated in infrastructure, energy and natural resource extraction, although there is a growing corporate presence in strategic sectors of the Mozambican economy.
Military cooperation is another area where the two have strengthened cooperation in recent years, building on a cooperation agreement signed in 2016.
Defense ministers from both countries expressed their intention to elevate military cooperation to a new level last summer. In October, both participated in military exercises in Mozambique and Tanzania focused on counter-terrorism operations, an area of interest for Mozambique, whose northernmost province has been plagued by terrorist violence since 2017.
