Over the past decade there has been a marked increase in the competition for influence in Africa. China is already well established there, but new players such as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have recently invested a ton of money to catch up. Europe and the United States consistently provide development funding, security assistance and private partnerships. All of them are trying to make inroads into the lucrative mineral extraction industry to diversify their economies and safeguard supply chains. Notably missing from the competition has been India, which has begun to believe that it can’t afford to sit out of the current scramble for influence – not only for its own sake but for the sake of its competition with China.

Unlike others, India has historical ties to Africa, especially its east coast. Trade links date back more than 2,000 years, and during the colonial era, the British moved large numbers of Indian indentured laborers to places like Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and South Africa. Thus, there are as many as 300,000 people with Indian heritage in East Africa and as many as 3 million if you include southern African nations along the Indian Ocean Basin. These cultural ties – along with the need to access critical minerals, counter Beijing’s influence, increase soft power and ensure India’s competitiveness in dominating the Indian Ocean – are motivating New Delhi to build partnerships with the region.

Though New Delhi cannot offer the level of financial assistance that China can, especially in infrastructure development, it has looked to substantially increase investments in other development areas, including energy and market access for Indian pharmaceuticals, machinery and IT. Indian private sector investment has homed in on telecommunications, vehicles and agriculture. Trade between India and Africa thus rose from $47 billion in 2012 to an estimated $100 billion in 2024.

It’s little surprise, then, that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has accelerated his efforts to engage the continent diplomatically. Since the end of 2024, he has personally visited Ghana, Namibia and Nigeria, and he has hosted the presidents of Kenya and Tanzania. India’s external affairs minister has made five trips to Africa over the past two years, and new embassies have been opened in a variety of countries. Rhetorically, India has presented itself as a like-minded developing nation that wants to support its comrades in Africa, even symbolically inviting the African Union to be a permanent member of the G20. In short, New Delhi wants to strengthen ties and improve its standing so that it can be seen as a viable alternative to China.

Naval Partnerships

Perhaps the most important aspect of this budding relationship is engagement through joint naval activities. Over the past year, there has been a significant uptick in maritime and naval activity, which India says is necessary to help development and ensure free trade. Indian naval vessels have been patrolling the Indian Ocean, conducting anti-piracy operations, escorting merchant vessels, and developing listening stations and posts in Mauritius, Madagascar and the Seychelles. New Delhi has helped to establish defense academies in Ethiopia, Nigeria and Tanzania and a war game training facility in Uganda, and it helms the regional naval group known as the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium.

Importantly, these military activities could hardly be described as large scale; most of them have taken place at the bilateral and even trilateral level. Since December 2024, the Indian navy and coast guard have conducted bilateral exercises with South Africa, Madagascar, Mauritius and the Seychelles, and since 2008 they have held biannual drills with South Africa and Brazil.

All this could be chalked up to India’s broader regional strategy to protect shipping lanes and ensure freedom of navigation. But it seems New Delhi is now expanding its strategy. In April, it cohosted the first Africa-India Key Maritime Engagement with the Tanzanian military. Ten nations attended the event – all of them located along the Indian Ocean – and it looks like it will be an ongoing fixture of Indian naval diplomacy. The event coincided with the deployment of the INS Sunayna, a large Indian patrol vessel crewed by Indian servicemen as well as foreign personnel from Comoros, Kenya, Madagascar, Maldives, Mauritius, Mozambique, Seychelles, Sri Lanka and South Africa.

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Enhanced naval cooperation is just one part of wider military engagement that also seeks to increase Indian arms sales to help meet the $5 billion annual target for export by the end of 2025. (The drive toward greater self-sufficiency itself falls under the Make in India campaign meant to boost Indian manufacturing.) In 2023, India held its first India-Africa Army Chiefs Conclave, which brought together the heads of 20 African militaries from across the continent. Military attaches have been appointed for the first time to Africa, with appointees in Ivory Coast, Mozambique, Ethiopia and Djibouti to support weapons sales and training regimes. Before Modi visited Nigeria last year, a delegation from the Indian defense industry met in Lagos, where the president expressed an interest in buying Indian arms. Around the same time, Angola and Ethiopia signed memorandums of understanding with India aimed at enhancing defense cooperation and extending lines of credit to purchase Indian hardware. In this way, India is poised to fill the void left by Russia, which had been the biggest arms exporter to Africa before the war in Ukraine depleted its capacity.

Critical Minerals

Critical minerals also play a significant role in Indian outreach. In the field of rare earths and critical minerals, China holds a monopoly on global manufacture and extraction. India, despite having the fifth largest reserves, continues to encounter domestic production and processing challenges. And the U.S.-China trade war, which has restricted rare earth exports, has made it all the more urgent for India to scale up production. This is why members of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, more commonly known as the Quad and comprising the U.S., Japan, India and Australia, held a foreign minister-level meeting in July to create the Quad Critical Minerals Initiative to strengthen supply chains for critical minerals.

India is also positioned to partner with countries that are similarly trying to goose rare earth production. It has, for example, partnered with Australia to process rare earths more cheaply and is looking at lithium and copper smelting using government-linked companies such as Adani. In doing so, India hopes to become a leading competitor to China in rare earths processing, magnet and battery manufacture, electronics and green energy production. Its efforts have the added benefit of potentially reducing its own dependencies on hydrocarbon imports. Indeed, India depends on oil imports for nearly 90 percent of its domestic consumption, so increased domestic energy production and storage capacity could eliminate a key strategic vulnerability.

Africa is essential in this regard. Not only is the continent rich in rare earths, it is awash in critical minerals like lithium and cobalt that are needed to produce the kinds of things Washington wants to buy from countries outside of China. India is thus finalizing plans to provide incentives to companies to set up rare earth processing and magnet production facilities to meet local demand and to help supply Japanese and American markets. This serves the dual purpose of developing the Indian economy and positioning New Delhi as a strategically vital partner in reducing Quad members’ reliance on China.

Through the National Mineral Development Corp., India has been preparing to enter mining markets in Africa. On July 1, the enterprise opened a strategic center in the United Arab Emirates to broaden its market access, and earlier it commenced a three-year copper and cobalt exploration campaign in Zambia. East African countries such as Tanzania, Madagascar and Mozambique are home to deposits of graphite, nickel, cobalt and copper, and the region is vital to transit routes for materials coming from farther inland.

Despite all India’s efforts, some obstacles will confound its outreach. For example, New Delhi can’t throw as much money at the continent as Beijing can; it has to be more selective on projects such as energy investment that can expand the Indian economy. Yet its aspirations remain high. Early successes over the past few years have increased trade ties and have deepened military cooperation – both of which will help the Indian defense industry grow. And though some African governments see India’s less conditional, technical cooperation model as preferable to Western aid or Chinese loans, many still prefer the sheer scale of funding China can offer.