In the Senegalese city of Thies, a new enterprise, "Senbus," is assembling 30-seat buses for the domestic and regional markets. The first units of this first vehicle factory in Senegal rolled out the plant's doors in September 2003, thanks to a partnership between Senegalese investors and Tata International, one of India's largest companies.

The factory is a "proud symbol of South-South cooperation," Indian Minister of State Digvijay Singh said at the inauguration ceremony. Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade commended the Indian government for "knowing how to convince the Indian private sector to invest in Senegal, a brother country."

Wade noted that such ventures fit the priorities of the continent's New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), which stresses collaboration between African and non-African countries. "Forward with the African private sector!" Wade declared at the close of his speech. "Long live Senegalese-Indian cooperation!"

Senbus is but one example of Senegal's interaction with India. This year, Senegal's largest enterprise, a chemical manufacturer, is expected to export $155 million worth of phosphoric acid to that country. Meanwhile, the Indian government is training Senegalese technicians and professionals and is supporting projects in rice, cotton, solar energy and new information technologies. It is exploring the feasibility of building a railway between Senegal's north and south.

The growing ties between Senegal and India reflect a wider trend. Across Africa, more countries are forging new relations with their counterparts in developing Asia.

"For historical reasons, we used to pay attention only to Western countries," notes Kheri Iddi Milao, acting chief of the Zanzibar Bureau of Foreign Affairs, in Tanzania. "Now this has changed. We are shifting our eyes to Asia."

And Asia is looking in Africa's direction. Africa is "an increasingly close neighbor in today's shrinking world," said Tan Sri Bernard Giluk Dompok, minister in the office of Malaysia's prime minister, at the Third Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD). Building stronger bridges between the two regions was one of the main themes of last year's Sept. 29-Oct. 1 conference.

With the exception of Japan, most Asian countries are secondary players in providing aid to Africa, since they face serious financial constraints of their own. Despite these limitations, the vibrancy of some Asian economies appears to have led to an increase in their aid.

In 2003, India established a new India-Africa Fund. Its goal is to allocate up to $200 million in credits to various projects that promote African economic integration, within the framework of NEPAD.

Generally, Asian countries concentrate on providing Africans with knowledge and access to technologies. India has long been a leader in this field. In 1964 it established the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) program, which has trained more than 10,000 Africans at Indian institutions in fields such as small-industry development, agriculture, new information technologies, financial management, diplomacy and employment planning.

In recent years, ITEC has been training more than 1,000 people annually, with a majority of them generally coming from Africa. The program has also supported projects in Africa itself, such as an entrepreneurship development center in Senegal and a plastics-technology demonstration center in Namibia.

Africa is benefiting from a growing Asian interest in the continent's investment opportunities. Because of the high profit rates that foreign investors can earn in Africa -- combined with improvements in Africa's investment codes, the privatization of state enterprises and the liberalization of economic management -- Asian investments began to mount in the early 1990s.

A large delegation of Chinese businessmen took part in a December 2003 China-Africa cooperation forum in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. During the event, 17 Chinese companies signed agreements with African counterparts worth a total of $460 million.

Asia's other large developing economy, India, also has extensive investments in Africa. As of 2002, Indian enterprises had a total of $330 million invested in 43 projects in Egypt alone. Indian companies are active in chemical ventures in Morocco and Tanzania, copper mining in Zambia, oil in Mauritius and Madagascar and telecommunications and textiles in Malawi. In Uganda, India is now the third largest source of foreign direct investment (after Britain and Kenya).

In 2003, India's state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation made further investments in Sudanese oil exploration and production and won contracts to build a 720-km oil pipeline and upgrade an oil refinery. The company's total investments in Sudan that year reached $1.6 billion -- an enormous sum for any African country, considering that all foreign investments to the entire continent reached only $11 billion the year before.

To African exporters, Asia is an enormous market that they have only begun to tap. Asian businesses, in turn, are beginning to more systematically explore how they can sell their goods in Africa, especially in countries where economic growth has been strong.

Between 1995 and 2001, total trade between Africa and developing Asia grew by nearly 50 percent, from $20.9 billion to $30.1 billion, with much of the increase in Africa's exports to Asia going to China and India. The competitiveness of Asian merchandise is a mixed blessing, however.

When cheap Asian textiles or rice flood African markets, local producers often are hurt by reduced sales of their own goods. They argue that trade liberalization has exposed them to unfair foreign competition and urge their governments to impose higher duties on such imports to help protect African producers.

African exporters also complain that some Asian countries subsidize their agricultural production -- giving them a competitive edge in world markets that Africans generally do not enjoy. As well, they criticize the persistence of tariffs and other trade barriers that hamper the sale of African commodities in Asian markets.

At the TICAD conference in Tokyo, Kenyan Minister of Planning and National Development Peter Anyang' Nyong'o pointedly noted that "for Africa to realize meaningful and sustainable economic growth, there is need for increased market access for African products into Japan and other Asian countries."