Africa, India and the New Architecture of Development Diplomacy

Speaker: Veda Vaidyanathan, Associate, Harvard University Asia Center; Associate Fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress in New Delhi

Online, via Zoom. Register here.

Abstract: India-Africa relations have long been rooted in shared anti-colonial solidarities and political visions of a more just global order. Today, that foundation is evolving into a dynamic, economically driven partnership shaped as much by private enterprise, social actors, and grassroots innovation as by state diplomacy.Drawing on field research across both regions, this talk examines how India and diverse countries in Africa are together forging a new development paradigm. One that resists the hierarchies of traditional aid, foregrounds mutual learning, and centers local agency. This paradigm is not codified in policy declarations but practiced in the everyday negotiations of businesspeople, engineers, farmers, and entrepreneurs. In a fractured global order, Africa-India cooperation offers not a model, but a method, grounded, plural, and adaptive, for rethinking how development is done in and from the Global South.