With an interest in sub-Saharan Africa’s energy access and China’s investment in the continent’s energy sector, University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) PhD candidate Congyi Dai says his work aims to understand how development aid can be made more transparent while giving the countries receiving aid greater negotiating power. 

“What I am asking is if development aid is a business,” says Dai. “In the dialogue of development, Africa is often portrayed as not being proactive, taking whatever Western countries give them, but if we can see it as more of a conversation and negotiation, they can be seen as equals.”

Dai, a Rackham Predoctoral Fellow, says his focus is specifically on the energy sector because donors and investors tend to have an interest in accessing mines and other natural resources in Africa, and may use contributions to energy infrastructure development as a pathway to gaining access to valuable resources.

“Energy transitions are something that’s talked about a lot, which is a process that requires key minerals needed to build electric vehicles, wind turbines and more, and whoever has access to mining and processing them has the upper hand in international competition,” says Dai.

By combining data sets, Dai is quantitatively analyzing the outcomes of Chinese investments in energy infrastructure projects in Africa and investigating patterns and impacts, as well as understanding investment intentions. He says that, thus far, there is a lack of such empirical evidence on the impact of Chinese investment in Africa, which is a gap he wants to fill. 

“Existing studies use either case studies or data with limited scope to infer China’s overseas activities and their connection to natural resource extraction. What I am doing is building a systematic country-level panel data set that tracks both Chinese development finance and mine acquisitions across 54 African countries,” says Dai. “This dataset will provide robust and systematic empirical evidence on what I call in my dissertation, 'The Development Quid Pro Quo.’ 

This past summer, Dai was one of 37 out of 23,000 applicants worldwide to be selected to participate in an internship with the World Bank Group. He says that the opportunity to live in Washington, D.C., working with the energy team focused on the East Asia Pacific Region, exposed him to different aspects of the energy transition.

“Our team spent the summer working on a flagship report on industrial decarbonization in East Asia,” says Dai. “It was eye-opening to explore all the different pathways for decarbonization.”

Currently, Dai is the Global China Pre-doctoral Research Fellow at Boston University, where he researches Chinese clean energy technologies and African countries’ preparedness to import them for light industrial decarbonization

Dai says that when he first decided to pursue a PhD at SEAS, he expected to have a more narrow focus on energy access issues, but that his experiences thus far have proven otherwise. 

“As a PhD student, you are expected to be a subject matter expert in your chosen field. What I’ve realized is that breadth is equally important as depth. In my case, it’s not just technical aspects of the energy transition, but includes job impacts, green financing and much more. With this understanding, I am looking to branch out more and continue to learn about other aspects of  sustainability transitions.”

Dai’s advisor, SEAS Professor Pam Jagger, says she is very excited by his groundbreaking research. 

“Congyi has a rare quality, he is so creative in how he puts data together to explore challenging research questions. He is going to be able to answer important questions about the direct and indirect effects of Chinese investment in Africa that people long speculated over, but have been unable to definitively answer. I’m also so proud of his success competing for highly competitive opportunities like the World Bank Internship,” says Jagger.