Keeping it local

Bakari Omari, a 21-year-old man from Tanga, the second biggest city in Tanzania, is among the numerous Africans that have benefited from Chinese investment.

Omari grew up in a poor family with several kids, and only finished seventh grade. It was hard for him to get a job in his hometown. In February when he heard there was a Chinese enterprise in Zanzibar recruiting laborers, he went there and got his first job.

He now earns 4,500 shillings ($3) for one day's work. Normally, local enterprises only pay 4,000 shillings ($2.7) per day for laborers. "I hope I can work here all along, and make 5,000 shillings ($3.3) for a day," he said.

His goal is to make some money and then go back for further education. "I hope I can live better than people in my neighborhood," he said.

Omari is working on a project for the Beijing Construction Engineering Group Ltd. (BCEG) - a new terminal building for the Zanzibar International Airport. The Chinese Government provided a 30-year preferential loan of 480 million yuan ($73.85 million). The whole project will cost $704 million.

The project started in February, and will be finished by January 31, 2014, according to BCEG and will be able to serve 3 million passengers every year when completed. "The new terminal will be a landmark of the Zanzibar region and the whole of Tanzania," said Wu Qing, a BCEG representative.

"We needed at least 120 laborers every day for underground works. Now that those works have finished, we need only 60. All the laborers are Tanzanian citizens," he said. "Our supervisors are mostly local people, too. They can get 10,000 shillings ($6.6) per day, which is a pretty high income in the country."

It is not fair to say Chinese enterprises hire only workers from China, he said. "Our projects bring a lot of job opportunities for local people, not just in Africa. In Mongolia, at lease half of our employees are local. In Malaysia, all employees must be Malaysian or Indonesian, due to local regulations."

(Reporting from Johannesburg, South Africa, and Zanzibar, Tanzania)