Since the 1950s, the West’s African policy has mostly consisted of two words: direct aid. In the last 50 years, more than $1 trillion has been sent to African nations, in the form of outright grants as well as (frequently defaulted upon) loans that are intended for infrastructure and capacity-building in recipient nations. Latin America and Asian countries likewise benefited from Western largesse—but today, as president Obama has pointed out, the African nations that received similar support are orders of magnitude behind other emerging markets. What gives?

Critics of current aid policies, most prominently economist Dambisa Moyo, say that the decades of humanitarian assistance have stunted the development of both human and real capital in nations that receive money from the West. Aid, she writes, “has been, and continues to be, an unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster for most parts of the developing world.”

Moyo’s view is controversial. But the idea that there are problems with the West’s African aid policy is not. A recently released internal report criticizing the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs observed that HIV/AIDS programs “spend more on medication than prevention,” and that, while the U.S. sends millions of pounds of food to feed Africans, “it is not focusing as it might on helping Africans feed themselves” through agricultural development and fair trade practices. Building schools alone does not create an educated class of Africans. In short, the United States spends too much time putting out fires and not enough time building fire hydrants.

What makes this state of affairs all the more urgent is that there is now a competitor for the attention, resources, and capacity of African nations. As Clinton’s questioner mentioned, the Chinese government has persistently invested in trade and direct investment in African countries, from Zambia to Tanzania to Kenya. China has pledged to increase its trade volume with the continent to $100 billion in the next decade. As I wrote in a previous report probing the Sino-African partnership, “This dynamic does not apply to every country in Africa, or to every Chinese business deal. But despite uncomfortable echoes of imperialism, in practice China is the only global power laying the tracks for an Africa-wide economic renaissance.”

Granted, the Chinese government has no interest in human rights issues or the good governance standards that the U.S. frequently requires of its trade and aid partners. From China, “there have been no pretences that this is about development per se, or humanitarian assistance per se,” says Daphne Wysham of the liberal Institute for Policy Studies. “It’s solely about business transactions.” But the U.S. role in this economic ménage à trois is also primarily motivated by profit. “We hear about all of the problems in Africa,” says Wysham, “and what we don’t hear is the role of our corporations in aggravating and contributing to these problems.”

Consider again the Congo: A government-backed Chinese conglomerate is offering to build roads and highways, schools, hospitals and electric lines in exchange for the right to mine some of the world’s richest deposits of minerals like cobalt, coltan, and copper (which are used abundantly in Chinese-built electronics). The Chinese are offering $9 billion for such access, but are likely interested in roads only insofar as they can be used to truck the valuable minerals out of the Congo. But for a country that is as large as Western Europe and has only 500 miles of paved roads, it’s a tantalizing offer. Western nongovernmental organizations and human rights organizations such as the Carter Center as well as the International Monetary Fund have successfully stalled the deal, citing in part the fact that the Chinese will retain a 68 percent stake in the venture. Compare this arrangement, however, with the paltry 17.5 percent stake that the American mining giant Freeport-McMoran is offering the same state-run company—minus the infrastructure.