Consultant: BRI leads to prosperity, not debt trap

Almost six years after the Belt and Road Initiative was proposed, the grand vision for promoting common development has been transforming into a solution for speeding up global cooperation for greater prosperity, said Hannah Ryder, CEO of Development Reimagined, an international development consultancy based in Beijing.

Ryder said she noticed that as global enthusiasm for the BRI grows, some misleading messages have been heard. One such message claims that the BRI pushes some countries into a "debt trap".

Taking her continent, Africa, as an example, Ryder said it needs a great deal of new infrastructure - from train lines to power stations.

"But African governments are not large or rich enough to pay for this by themselves, so they need external help as loans from either the private sector or other international partners to secure at least $63 billion per year, according to an estimate by the African Development Bank," she said.

"It's been shown in many studies that the more countries spend on infrastructure, the more their economies grow."

In Kenya, Ryder's home country, the Nairobi-Mombasa Railway - which was funded and built by China - ferried more than 2.5 million passengers and nearly 3.9 million tons of cargo since its launch in May 2017 through March this year, according to the Kenyan government.

Ryder said the so-called debt trap discourse is highly questionable. In fact, taking Africa as an example, debts owed to China make up only a small share of the total.

"In addition, with the BRI and new global funds like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, there is a great opportunity ahead for everyone," she said.

Ryder is a former Kenyan and British diplomat and an economist with more than 15 years of experience. She runs Development Reimagined, a wholly foreign-owned enterprise based in Beijing, and is also the representative to China at China-Africa Advisory, a consultancy on the development of the continent.

Before that, she led the United Nations Development Programme's work with China to help it scale up and improve its cooperation with other developing countries, including African nations.

Q&A with Hannah Ryder

What role do you think the Belt and Road Initiative will play in promoting sustainable global development and global governance? What specific steps should the BRI take to bridge inequality?

The Belt and Road Initiative emphasizes infrastructure and industrialization. What's really interesting from President Xi Jinping's speech yesterday was the emphasis on green sustainable development. If that is pushed from the Chinese side, that would be really important, because for many countries, such as Kenya and lots of other countries around the world, even if they want green financing, they don't have an idea of what the standards are and they don't have the regulatory ability to push those standards. If China can say these are the top standards that we would like to share with you and push those standards, that would be helpful. Inequality is rising everywhere and there is a disparity. One way that we can reduce inequality is definitely to manage taxes. But for the Belt and Road Initiative, foreign direct investment is really key. We have millions of people without jobs in the African continent, if we have foreign direct investment and give them jobs, that would be the first step before the government can manage the taxation and so on.