Skill development and employment opportunity from Chinese migrating ‘Geese’ in sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Considering Chinese FDI in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the paper attempts to verify if the long-existing ‘flying geese’ paradigm (FGP) might be used to clarify the headway of Chinese migrating geese transmission of skills and job generation in SSA. Notably, since factory workers’ wages have increased in China, small but important migrating geese could, perhaps, be perceived as the vanguard of the flying geese – migrating to SSA to capitalize on those SSA nations with lower costs bases. As a result, the scientific task of this paper rests on answering three questions: Why do we have growing Chinese manufacturing activities in SSA? Are these new Chinese migrating geese bridging the unemployment gap and skills shortage? Also, since the Chinese migrating geese are moving to an environment where operations are cheaper, a third question is to specifically find out if the Chinese migrating geese are in Nigeria, and if they perceive local skills development and job creation to be a salient matter? Against this backdrop, the author argues that these Chinese migrating geese seem to contribute partly in transferring skills and job creation by standing-in as a worthwhile catalyst to upgrade the follower’s economy in the process of catching up a leader.