Mapping the conceptual and spatial footprints of Singapore's knowledge transfer to Africa

We transitioned from labour-intensive industries to skills-intensive industries in the 1970s and 1980s, and to a knowledge-based economy in the late 1990s. From 2010, we sought to develop a skills-intensive and innovation driven economy, and to position Singapore as a distinctive global city (Heng, 2024).1 To many observers, one of Singapore's major accomplishments in past decades has been the development of a knowledge-based economy. Exporting the products of this economy, knowledge and expertise, to the developing world, in the name of the ‘Singapore model’, has been widely noted (Chua, 2011; Pow, 2014; Woods & Kong, 2017; Lee et al., 2025).2 This commentary maps the conceptual and spatial dynamics of knowledge transfer projects and initiatives between Singapore and Africa. By articulating these dynamics, we identify some distinctions between Singapore's contribution to African development and other examples of knowledge transfer in Africa and elsewhere. Knowledge transfer refers to the sharing of expertise, skills, and practices with people and institutions. It can lead to policy transfer3 but may not result in policymaking especially when it happens in the private sector without much involvement of policymakers. Knowledge transfer, as we conceive of it, is typically hierarchical—with the expert providing knowledge to the recipient—and unidirectional—with no countering transfer of knowledge from the recipient to the provider, except perhaps for what is needed to contextualize the provider's knowledge to the recipient. This, we suggest, is different from knowledge sharing, where there is a mutual exchange of expertise. In the case studies that we have examined, Singapore is typically portrayed as adopting the role of knowledge provider, while African countries act as recipients. While instances of ‘mutual exchange’ do occur, they are often confined to specific times and spaces like conferences and panel discussions. Knowledge transfer occurred extensively through workshops, site visits, and collaborative planning sessions, where Singaporean experts share practices and solutions tailored to the local context. Singaporean organizations have been actively involved in knowledge transfer through creating urban plans and solutions for cities encompassing development, governance and management, housing, transportation, ‘smart’ technology adoption, and environmental sustainability. These points of intervention leverage Singapore as a model of development. For this to be effective, Singapore has marketed and modelled its expertise. As Collins and Evans (2007) note, there are typically three ‘meta-criteria’ by which experts are identified: credentialing, experience, and track record. Not possessing the means to evaluate the expert knowledge entirely themselves, recipients of expert knowledge must rely on proxies or indicators of expertise such as their qualifications, the expert's record of success in a domain, or some assessment of the expert's experience. As this track record builds, marketing efforts become more compelling. In more than 90 projects and programmes over the last decade, Singapore's experts have effectively marketed both their ‘hard’ expertise (skills and techniques) on sustainable and smart development and their ‘soft’ expertise (strategies and institutions) on managing and governing the city to business and political leaders in African countries, building an extensive record across the continent. African countries are open to learning such knowledge and expertise for various reasons, including finding model experts that can exemplify best international practices and state-of-the-art knowledge. For some small states, knowledge transfer is driven by the political capital of becoming the ‘Singapore of Africa’. Over the past decade, various media outlets have reported that the states of Rwanda, Djibouti, Mauritius, Tunisia, and Gabon have all adopted this term (i.e. Bock, 2018). In so doing, the ‘Singapore of Africa’ becomes a symbol for an envisioned future—an image of a developed, technologically advanced small state marked by rapid economic growth and a clean, green environment. Such aspiration prompts many small African countries to learn from Singapore's development experiences, among which Rwanda takes most seriously by involving Singaporean actors and enterprises in their city-wide and nationwide strategies. Larger African states have also welcomed Singapore's knowledge transfer, but typically in a more restricted manner through specific projects and activities. Knowledge is transferred from Singapore to African countries primarily in three ways—planning, consulting, and training. In total, 95 projects were identified from news articles and government websites. Three selection criteria for knowledge transfer projects were applied in this study: first, it must be publicly available on news or government reports; second, it must reveal specific information about the theme of knowledge transfer between a Singaporean organization and an African country (instead of Africa in general); and third, it must have already taken place or reference an ongoing programme (i.e. news about future agenda is not counted). Figure 1 shows the spatial distribution of Singapore's knowledge transfer projects in Africa. The top five African countries with the largest number of projects are Rwanda, Ghana, Tanzania, Mauritius, and Kenya. Within each circle, we have also indicated the composition of three types of knowledge transfer. Sources: Map produced by Maurits Arif Fathoni Lubis (design) and Liurong Wang (data) with authors’ guidance. Basemap sources include ESRI and opendatasoft.com. For a list of key content sources, see endnote 4. Planning concerns knowledge and expertise on such things as developing blueprints for a city, an industrial and economic zone, or a specially purposed area (e.g. airports, ecological parks). For instance, African capital cities Bujumbura and Conakry's master plans were made with Singaporean planning firms through collaborative efforts. In these master plans, not only were conceptual frameworks proposed, but open suggestions were also provided, thereby creating room for African urban planners and policymakers to insert their agency. One of Singapore's leading planning firms involved in international knowledge transfer is Surbana Jurong. As a government-owned planning consultancy with origins as a subsidiary of Singapore's Housing and Development Board, Surbana Jurong is well-regarded for its expertise in urban planning and industrial park development (Chua, 2011: 48). From a local consulting agency, Surbana Jurong has evolved into a global firm aiming to export urban planning knowledge. Among all the cities that hired Surbana Jurong, the City of Kigali, a provincial-level city under Rwanda's government, made the greatest commitment to planning its long-term urban future. They first commissioned Surbana Jurong in 2013 to produce a master plan for Kigali through 2020. This plan emphasized district plans within Kigali. In 2019, Surbana Jurong was invited to return to update the Master Plan with a vision through 2050 (Surbana Jurong, 2020). Consulting involves offering specialized solutions to certain issues that are identified and proposed by clients from Africa. Although Singaporean companies in the private sector are the major actors providing consulting services, Singapore's government authorities, especially Singapore Cooperation Enterprise and Enterprise Singapore, have been crucial coordinators and facilitators that build platforms and bridge Singaporean companies and African clients. The subjects of knowledge transfer in consulting services usually pertain to those key themes in the Singapore model. For instance, in 2017, Singapore Cooperation Enterprise coordinated diagnostic work for theme-based marketing and human resources development for the Zanzibar Commission for Tourism. In 2019, with Enterprise Singapore's facilitation, Singapore's analytics firm Graymatics and African ICT firm Crescentech Limited jointly provided security and surveillance solutions in industries including banking, telecommunications, and retail across Kenya, South Africa, and Nigeria. From management and marketing expertise in the tourism sector to technological expertise in the ICT sector, knowledge transfer takes place in a unidirectional way from Singapore to African countries. Training is another important, typically unidirectional, practice of knowledge transfer. Training providers, in these instances, are usually Singapore's government agencies and educational institutions. The training programmes target both African civil servants and private sector practitioners. The rationale behind these programmes is that high-quality human capital serves as the foundation of an efficient and effective developmental state. Many of these programmes, closely tied to the framing of capacity building, are short-term courses and workshops, lasting from a few days to two weeks. Exceptional cases are one-year master's programmes offered by the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore and S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University, sponsored by the newly established Singapore-Africa Partnership Package (2022–2025). In addition to bringing African visitors to Singapore, short training programmes also took place in African countries, such as Ease of Doing Business workshops in Senegal and Equatorial Guinea, and Côte d'Ivoire. From the above categorization of knowledge transfer practices, we distinguish expertise that is relational and continuous from expertise that is transactional and periodical. The former, notably in planning practices, involves ongoing reciprocal relationships of knowledge exchanges where experts may become embedded in a local context or invest deeply in a project. The latter, typically in consulting and training practices, involves knowledge transfer that is unidirectional and occurs on specific intermittent occasions, often predetermined in advance through, for example, a contractual obligation. Of course, this too involves an exchange but in the form of compensation for expert provisions rather than shared information. Comparing these two types of expertise, we found that Singapore's knowledge transfer to Africa is predominately transactional and periodical (80 per cent consulting and training vs. 20 per cent planning cases). Moreover, among 25 countries identified with Singapore's knowledge transfer cases, nine are small states, according to the criteria of membership at the Forum of Small States (FOSS) which Singapore founded in 1992. Among them, the top three small states—Rwanda, Mauritius, and Gabon—altogether account for a quarter of all cases. The collected data further suggests this tendency, which is indicated in the map through circle symbols of knowledge transfer which are often located in the light- coloured countries with fewer population as compared to dark- coloured countries. Knowledge transfer involves more than simply passing on knowledge: through its necessarily selective and time-limited form, knowledge transfer carries with it an ideological element, in the sense that it constructs the types of knowledge that should be prioritized and valued (Berger & Luckmann, 1967; Mannheim, 2008). Experts explicitly attempt to justify this prioritization, potentially with reference to developmental models and teleological imaginations of a technoscientific future, but it can also simply be left implied. This work is part of how experts position themselves and assert their epistemic authority. Here ‘ideological’ does not refer to the political-partisan dimension of ideologies but an implicit ideology of development associated with aspiration. The themes of Singapore's knowledge transfer—the smart city, sustainability, and capacity—contain such ‘ideologies’. Due to their central positionality in the domain of the Singaporean model, they are prioritized over other themes in knowledge transfer projects provided to African countries. For instance, at the Africa-Singapore Business Forum in 2023, the agreements signed between organizations at both sides focus on these thematical matters (Enterprise Singapore, 2023). In contrast to Chinese knowledge transfer projects which involve continuous ‘on-the-ground’ engagement over years (Gillespie, 2014; Auffray & Fu, 2015), Singapore's knowledge transfer remains a transactional form of expertise. Currently, many scholars are working to understand knowledge transfer within the Global South, due to its complex relational, mutual, and putatively ‘non-hegemonic’ characteristics (Whitney 2022; Silva & Ward 2024: 9). That said, what to make of Singapore's knowledge transfers to Africa amidst South-South frameworks? Despite the predominance of unidirectional transfer processes and transactional expertise, arguably Singapore's practice is qualitatively different from knowledge transfer in Africa's colonial pasts and neocolonial presents where scientific knowledge and expertise ‘delineated the relationship of power and authority between rulers and ruled’ (Beinart et al., 2009: 413). Thus, while the transfer of knowledge is unidirectional, this does not mean that it must be straightforwardly hierarchical (and ‘top-down’). Singapore's interactions with Africa embody a complex circulation of Singapore's development model and experiences. In these practices, knowledge is passed along rather than being passed down. Further, while we have conceived of this relationship spatially, it is important to note that this relationship also forges anticipations of future development. Understanding the mechanisms by which this knowledge transfer anticipates and mobilizes the future, together with a particular and ideological imagination of the future, requires further research. We would like to thank Liurong Wang for collecting the data and Maurits Arif Fathoni Lubis for designing the map. Our gratitude also extends to SJTG's Co-Editor James D. Sidaway and Associate Editors, TC Chang and Godfrey Yeung for their helpful comments on an earlier draft.