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The purpose of this paper is to examine China-Africa educational cooperation under the framework of Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) while illustrating the modalities of Sino-Africa educational cooperation.

Based on empirical and documentary analysis, the paper describes and explores the unique features of China-Africa educational cooperation.

In the past decades, China's expanding engagement with Africa in the field of international development assistance has attracted great attention and given rise to mixed reactions and arguments at the international level. China's cooperation with Africa has a long and notable history, dating back to the 1950s. China's cooperation with other developing countries is known as South-South development cooperation, based on principles of equality, mutual benefit, solidarity and no conditionality. With a thorough and critical analysis of the decision-making mechanism and the practices of China's educational cooperation with Africa, this paper puts forward some important issues regarding the perspective of sustainability and effectiveness in Chinese cooperative arrangements.

The paper tries to explain the dynamic and the practices of China's education engagement with Africa and puts forward key challenges regarding its effectiveness toward new strategic partnerships. However, the answers to these questions require some innovative measures in the future practices of China-Africa educational cooperation.

The China-Africa education partnership is not a stand-alone sector, which can be better understood in the context of the historical development of China-Africa cooperation and under the framework of the FOCAC.

This paper intends to provide a thematic literature review of the scholarly research articles orbiting the Sino–African education cooperation and exchange, published between 2005 and 2022.

The methodology used in this paper is qualitative in nature with a thematic approach. The author used content analysis techniques to spotlight the major themes of the topic studied. The author selected the papers and theses, based on their heuristic capacity, from two major databases for the English and Chinese literature: Web of Science and CNKI. The selection process resulted in 60 high-quality peer-reviewed articles and theses. Another 30 research articles and theses were used as supplementary resources.

The literature concentrates on six points: the historical development, the nature of the exchange, the frameworks of the cooperation, vocational training and knowledge transfer, African students in China and their experiences, and education cooperation and soft power. However, research tends to be somewhat polemical rather than an academic debate between Chinese researchers and their western peers. Therefore, empirical studies beyond the geopolitical preoccupations and the “YEA” or “NAY” to the Sino–African education exchange are critically needed.

The implications of this study go beyond the east/west or developed/developing world rhetoric and focus more on sustainable educational development on a global scale. Understanding how the literature on the Sino–African education engagement is shaping, provides valuable insights into international education in the global south. It can also be implied to approach educational engagement with other destinations such as India, Türkiye and Brazil.

This thematic literature review concentrates on the educational aspect of Sino–African relations. It compares English and Chinese peer-reviewed scholarly articles and theses on China–Africa educational engagement and has heuristic implications for sustainable educational development globally.