India, Africa and the Global South

The first principle

India and Africa first met as fellow subjects of empire, and that shared memory still shapes the way India wants to be seen on the continent: as a partner that builds capacity on African terms, not as a donor handing out aid or a creditor collecting debt. India has hard interests in Africa, such as markets, oil, minerals, food, sea lanes and votes in global bodies, but it cannot match the money of richer rivals, so its advantage lies in the manner of its engagement. The same logic sits behind India's claim to speak for the Global South, because that claim holds only as long as developing countries see India as one of them.

The core

A relationship older than the state

• Anti colonial solidarity. Gandhi spent twenty one years in South Africa (1893 to 1914), where he first used satyagraha against racial laws, so India's freedom struggle and Africa's were linked from the start. Independent India raised racial discrimination in South Africa at the United Nations (UN) in 1946, cut trade with the apartheid regime and backed liberation movements across the continent.
• Non alignment. The Asian African Conference at Bandung (1955) and the founding of the Non Aligned Movement (NAM) at Belgrade (1961) brought India and newly independent African states into one diplomatic camp, and African states became the largest regional group within NAM.
• The diaspora. Indentured labourers went to Natal from 1860, Indian workers built the Uganda Railway (1896 to 1901), and Gujarati traders spread across East Africa, so large communities of Indian origin live in South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Mauritius. Their history includes hardship as well, most sharply the expulsion of Asians from Uganda by Idi Amin in 1972.

The summit framework

• India Africa Forum Summit (IAFS). The first summit (New Delhi, 2008) and the second (Addis Ababa, 2011) used a limited format in which the African Union (AU) chose the participating countries. The third (New Delhi, 2015) invited all 54 African states and was attended by 41 heads of state or government, the largest gathering of African leaders India has hosted.
• What the 2015 summit promised. India offered 10 billion dollars in concessional credit over five years and 600 million dollars in grant assistance, including 50,000 scholarships, and adopted a Framework for Strategic Cooperation. The fourth summit, originally due in 2020, was postponed by the pandemic, leaving a long gap in the cycle.

The development partnership

• Lines of credit. Concessional loans, routed through the Export Import Bank of India (EXIM Bank) under the Indian Development and Economic Assistance Scheme, fund projects that the borrowing country chooses, such as power lines, railways, irrigation, sugar mills and parliament buildings. Africa receives the largest share of India's lines of credit.
• Capacity building. The Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) programme, running since 1964, trains thousands of African civil servants, engineers and officers every year, and Indian scholarships bring African students to Indian universities.
• Digital delivery. The Pan African e Network (2009) linked Indian universities and hospitals to African countries for tele education and tele medicine. Its successors, e VidyaBharti and e ArogyaBharti (2019), offer free online courses and medical education to African students.

Dimensions

• Principles of engagement. In July 2018, addressing the Parliament of Uganda, the Prime Minister set out ten guiding principles, now called the Kampala principles: Africa at the top of India's priorities, partnership guided by African priorities and on terms comfortable to Africans, open markets, digital and agricultural cooperation, climate action, joint work against terrorism, open seas, no rivalry played out on African soil, and a fairer global order.
• Economic. India is among Africa's largest trading partners, alongside the European Union, China and the United States, and a major investor in telecoms, mining, agriculture and pharmaceuticals. Since 2008 a Duty Free Tariff Preference scheme has opened the Indian market to the least developed countries, many of them African, while Africa supplies crude oil, gold, pulses and critical minerals.
• Health. Indian generic medicines brought down the cost of treatment for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection in Africa in the 2000s. In October 2020 India and South Africa jointly proposed a waiver of intellectual property rules under the World Trade Organization (WTO) for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID 19) products, and under Vaccine Maitri (2021) India sent made in India vaccines to many African countries as grants, commercial supplies and through the COVID 19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) facility.
• Maritime and defence. The Indian Navy has run anti piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden since 2008, helped secure Mozambique's waters, and responded to Cyclone Idai in Mozambique in 2019. India has built coastal radar links with Mauritius and Seychelles and an airstrip and jetty on Mauritius's Agalega island (opened in 2024), and in April 2025 held the first Africa India Key Maritime Engagement exercise with Tanzania.
• Multilateral. Africa holds more than a quarter of the UN's members, so its support matters for India's case on Security Council reform; both India and the AU want permanent seats for the developing world, though their formulas differ.

In practice

The digital partnership

• Open rails, not products. India offers its digital public infrastructure as open, adaptable models rather than as proprietary software. The Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP), built at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore, lets countries build Aadhaar style national identity systems that they own and run, and it has been adopted by countries including Ethiopia, Morocco and Togo.
• Payments. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) was launched in Mauritius in February 2024, and in 2024 the international arm of the National Payments Corporation of India agreed to help the Bank of Namibia build a UPI style instant payment system of its own.
• Institutions that last. The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras opened a campus in Zanzibar, Tanzania, in 2023, the first IIT outside India, and Indian institutions run training centres in information technology, vocational skills and entrepreneurship across the continent.
• Why it reads as co development. The partner country owns the code, hosts its own data, trains its own engineers and adapts the system to its laws, so the relationship is one of mutual respect rather than donor and recipient. India also benefits, because shared standards create markets for Indian firms and goodwill in global digital governance.

India and the Global South

• The term. "Global South" describes the developing countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Pacific, a divide drawn in the Brandt Report (1980) as a North South line. It replaced "Third World" and overlaps with NAM and the Group of 77, but it is a shared condition, not an organisation.
• The African Union in the G20. Under India's presidency, the New Delhi Summit of September 2023 admitted the AU as a permanent member of the G20, giving 55 states a seat at the main forum of economic governance.
• Voice of the Global South Summits. India convened virtual summits in January 2023, November 2023 and August 2024 to collect the concerns of developing countries on debt, food, energy and climate finance and carry them into the G20.

Issues and way forward

• Africa's growth story. Africa will hold about a quarter of the world's population by 2050 (UN projections), the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) began trading in 2021, and the AU's Agenda 2063 sets the continent's own goals. India's influence will depend on matching this with investment, not just goodwill.
• Scale against China. China has been Africa's largest trading partner since 2009, finances ports and railways through the Forum on China Africa Cooperation (FOCAC, since 2000) and the Belt and Road Initiative, and has a naval base in Djibouti. India cannot outspend China, so it should keep its distinct offer of skills, digital rails and demand driven projects, while debt troubles in countries such as Zambia make that offer more attractive.
• Slow delivery. Many lines of credit move slowly, because of weak project preparation and contractor delays. Better project monitoring, more grants for small projects and co financing with partners such as Japan, which India proposed through the Asia Africa Growth Corridor (2017), would help.
• A narrow base. Trade is concentrated in a few countries and commodities. A trade agreement with the AfCFTA, investment in mineral processing in Africa and a regular summit cycle would widen it.
• Credibility in the Global South. Critics argue that India's closeness to Western groupings weakens its old role as leader of the oppressed. India's answer is that a bridge between the North and the South delivers more, as the AU's G20 seat showed.

Common confusions

• Lines of credit and grants. A line of credit is a concessional loan that must be repaid, though on soft terms; grants, scholarships and ITEC training are given free.
• Pan African e Network and its successors. The first phase (2009) was a satellite and fibre network linking institutions; e VidyaBharti and e ArogyaBharti (2019) are web based platforms offering courses directly to students.
• IAFS and FOCAC. IAFS is India's summit with Africa, held in 2008, 2011 and 2015; FOCAC is China's, meeting every three years since 2000.
• Global South, NAM and the Group of 77. NAM is a political movement and the Group of 77 a negotiating bloc at the UN, while the Global South is a broader description of shared developmental position.

For the exam

• Keyword bank: India Africa Forum Summit, Kampala principles, lines of credit, ITEC, Pan African e Network, e VidyaBharti, demand driven, African Union in the G20, Agenda 2063, AfCFTA, MOSIP, co development, Vaccine Maitri, Voice of the Global South, South South cooperation.
• Practise the previous year questions on this topic →
• Use in an answer:
  • Introduction with data: "When the third India Africa Forum Summit met in New Delhi in 2015, all 54 African states attended, and India pledged 10 billion dollars in concessional credit and 50,000 scholarships."
  • Introduction with a principle: "In Kampala in 2018, India promised a partnership guided by African priorities, on terms comfortable to Africans, that would build capacity rather than create dependence."
  • Conclusion: "India cannot outspend China in Africa, but it can outlast it by building institutions, skills and open digital rails that African states own."
  • Conclusion: "The AU's seat in the G20, won under India's presidency, shows that India's standing in the Global South rests on what it delivers for others at the high table."