China Entangled With Developing World

China helped fueled a credit driven boom in developing markets, such as Kenya, where infrastructure development is a significant portion of Kenyan GDP.

Kenya's debt to China hits Sh101 billion as external loans pile

Kenya owes $1.1 billion (Sh101 billion) to China, nearly a third of which was stacked up over the first half of the government’s current fiscal year. The debt stood at about $0.85 billion (Sh82.8 billion) at the end of last June.

While China’s lending to Kenya has been growing in recent years, Japan has been reducing its credit over the same period.

The total debt is not even 2% of GDP, but China is playing a large role in GDP growth.

World Bank Raises Kenya’s 2015 Growth Forecast to 6 Percent

China is helping finance and building a $3.6 billion standard-gauge railway from the port of Mombasa, East Africa’s busiest, to Nairobi, in what the government has described as part of the largest infrastructure project in 50 years since the country gained independence. The state targets boosting installed power-generation capacity by 5,000 megawatts by 2017.

Risks to the outlook include the threat of insecurity, which has hurt tourism, a key source of foreign exchange, and pressure on the budget deficit as the government increases spending, the World Bank said.