China to strengthen digital cooperation with African countries

China will strengthen strategic alignment and discuss digital cooperation plans with African countries, so as to deepen China-Africa digital capacity building cooperation, the country's top industry regulator said.

Jin Zhuanglong, minister of industry and information technology, said at the Forum on China-Africa Digital Capacity Building Cooperation in Beijing on Thursday that China and Africa cooperation is an important part of the Belt and Road Initiative and China is willing to work with African partners to promote the continuous development of digital capacity building cooperation.

"More efforts will be made to strengthen policy exchanges, integrate our respective advantages, create a good business environment, and support enterprises to expand investment cooperation and achieve mutual benefits and win-win results," Jin said.

According to him, over the years, government departments, enterprises and research institutions of China and Africa have made joint efforts to continuously deepen digital cooperation and achieved significant results.

China has signed memorandums of understanding in the digital field with more than ten countries in Africa, and Chinese enterprises have developed well in Africa, with a number of successful cooperation cases emerging in fields such as digital infrastructure, smartphones, e-commerce payments and cloud services, demonstrating enormous development potential, Jin said.

He called for a push to deepen project cooperation and share the dividends of the digital economy.

Focusing on key areas such as new-generation mobile communication, cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, satellite internet, e-commerce, network security and digital transformation, "we will deeply tap into cooperation potential, enrich cooperation projects, expand cooperation space, and inject new impetus and depict a new landscape for the development of the digital economy between China and Africa in accordance with the principle of marketization," Jin said.