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Paper short abstract

The paper examines how Kenya, Tanzania, and Ethiopia navigate shifting aid geopolitics through multi-alignment strategies in a multipolar world, asking whether South-South Cooperation fosters genuine East African agency or replace Western conditionality with new hierarchies of debt and dependencies.

Paper long abstract

The emergence of a multipolar global order has disrupted traditional hegemony of Western development finance, introducing a new era characterized by diverse sources of aid, investment and influence. The growing prominence of South-South Cooperation (SSC) led by China, India, and the Gulf States and emerging powers of the Global South has profoundly reshaping development landscape in East Africa. Governments in Kenya, Tanzania, and Ethiopia have actively leveraged these new partnerships to finance large-scale infrastructure, energy and industrial projects, seeking to diversify external partnerships and reduce dependence on conditionalities of Western aid.

This paper investigates how these three states navigate this shifting geopolitical landscape by leveraging multi-alignment strategies. Through comparative analysis of flagship projects – including Chinese-financed Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) in Kenya, port and logistics development in Tanzania financed by Gulf States, and state-led industrialization and infrastructure financing in Ethiopia. While all three countries engaged in multi-alignment strategies, their distinct political economies shape divergent pathways. Kenya’s market-led approach has locked it into a debt-serving ‘infrastructure-for-extraction’ model, Tanzania similarly ties mega-projects to future mineral and gas extraction, while Ethiopia’s aggressive borrowing for industrial projects led to sovereign debt distress. The paper argues that while these East African states have successfully used multipolar alignment to expand their policy space, they remain entangled in a reconfigured hierarch that complicated the path towards a truly justice-oriented development. The experiences of these states underscore both the opportunities and the challenges inherent in navigating a rapidly changing landscape of global development and aid paradigm.