Brazilian development cooperation in Africa

One of the most important elements of the contemporary Brazilian engagement in Africa is related to the provision of development cooperation, particularly regarding the relation between providing cooperation and competition with other actors in the continent as well as supporting Brazilian economic and commercial interests.

Brazil has been receiving development cooperation since the 1950s, especially in the North and Northeast regions. As previously described, in the 1970s, Brazil sought to increase and diversify its foreign relations and the country became a provider of development cooperation at the same time that it continued to be a recipient. It was only under Lula that Brazil began to take on a new role as one of the most important non-DAC donors¹²⁵. African and South American nations were the first regions to receive aid and continue up to the present time to be the main destinations of Brazil’s aid programs.

According to the Brazilian government¹²⁶ and external actors, Brazil´s main source of cooperation is technical cooperation, since Brazil rarely provides aid recipients with cash, preferring to implement capacity building and professional training initiatives (Cabral and Weinstock, 2010; IPEA, 2010). Brazil’s cooperative efforts are coordinated by the Brazilian Cooperation Agency ( Agência Brasileira de Cooperação, ABC ) created in 1987 and subordinated to the Brazilian Foreign Ministry, which reveals that Brazilian development cooperation is used as a foreign policy instrument, benefiting countries considered to be strategic to the Brazilian national interest.

In the end of 2010, Brazilian and international media started noticing Brazil’s new role as an important provider of development cooperation¹²⁷. At the time, the ABC was developing 77 technical cooperation projects, more than half of them in the African continent. In 2009, African nations accounted for 50% of ABC´s budget and in 2010 this percentage was increased to 60% (IPEA, World Bank, 2011, p. 45).

During the Lula administration, an emphasis was placed on agricultural cooperation with the Africa continent. In an effort to promote Brazil’s domestically developed technology, Lula promoted Brazil’s energy sufficiency and praised the sugar-cane based ethanol production as Brazil’s major contribution to reducing the dependency on fossil fuels. The Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA) has opened an office in Accra (Ghana) in 2006 and is involved in projects in more than 13 African nations. Brazilian varieties of plants and seeds have been introduced in Africa for over 20 years (Sotero, 2009, p 20).

In addition, Brazil wishes to reproduce in the beginning of 2012 a successful national program that increased family based agriculture. The program will support the capacity of African and Latin American nations to increase their productivity. Ghana and Zimbabwe already signed agreements with the Brazilian government and Kenya, Mozambique, Tanzania, Cameroon, Namibia and Sudan also applied for similar partnerships. According to Brazilian authorities, the program also has a strategic dimension because it will increase the capacity of Brazilian companies to export agricultural machinery and supplies to the continent.¹²⁸ Another important project run by ABC and EMBRAPA is the Cotton-4 Project, based in Mali but benefiting also Benin, Burkina Faso and Chad. The project intends to increase the cotton productivity in the four countries in order to empower local producers and reduce poverty¹²⁹ (IPEA, World Bank, 2011, p. 56).

African nations have also benefited from the social programs implemented domestically in Brazil under the Lula administration. Representatives from several African countries visited the country as part of the Africa-Brazil Cooperation Program on Social Protection (ABCP) to learn about the implementation of these programs, that have a focus on social development strategies, child labor reduction and cash transfer, creating incentives for families to send their children to school ( Sotero, 2009, p. 19).

Education is also an important area of cooperation. Brazil has traditionally provided scholarships for African students to complete their graduate and undergraduate education in Brazilian public institutions. However, many of these students have faced racial discrimination while attending Brazilian universities. Brazil helped Cape Verde create its first public higher education institution in 2006 and in 2010, Brazil inaugurated the Federal University for Afro-Brazilian Integration¹³⁰, opened to students and professors from African countries. The university is located in the first Brazilian district to abolish slavery in 1883 (Redenção), even before the abolition of slavery in Brazil’s entire territory in 1888 (IPEA, World Bank, 2011, p.81).

In terms of evaluating Brazilian cooperation in Africa, it is important to note that most of the projects started to be implemented in less than ten years, making it still very recent to properly evaluate the impact of these initiatives (IPEA, World Bank, 2011, p.5). One important element of success for the initiatives is the fact that Brazil only exports social technology that was successfully implemented domestically. Brazil’s success story in Africa involves the perception that it is better to invest in a small number of long-term projects in order to promote partnerships with local actors ( IPEA, World Bank, 2011, p. 40).

However, the mere assumption that Brazilian agricultural policies will be successfully reproduced in the African context only because of similar climate and vegetation conditions, has to be challenged and debated. According to Cabral and Shankland, in terms of social policies, there has to be a reflection on the capacity of African countries to absorb these policies and in addition, the fact that social movements and civil society organizations played an important role in the development of social policies in Brazil, makes it important to consider the involvement of African civil society organizations in these cooperation initiatives conducted by Brazil (Cabral and Shankland, 2012, p. 34).