China is now the biggest nontraditional donor at the country level to some of the world’s poorest states, according to a recent report by the Overseas Development Institute that studied nine countries of low and middle income.
The East Asian nation accounted for more than half of the nontraditional financing, or what the report dubs “beyond ODA flows,” in countries including Laos, Ethiopia and Zambia. China also accounted for 70 percent of BOF — which includes grants and concessional loans, other official flows from bilateral and multilateral donors, and sovereign bonds, among others — in Cambodia and Ghana.
“We found that China accounted for an overwhelming share of new development finance load at the country level.” Romilly Greenhill, team leader for development finance at ODI, told Devex. “The landscape is indeed changing quite dramatically.”