Trade, facilitated by Beijing's deep public pockets, reciprocal visits by dignitaries, including Xi Jinping, and the estimated one million Chinese citizens who have made Africa home since 2001, soared to $200 billion last year, making China the continent's biggest trading partner. All of which has set off alarm bells in some Western quarters, with dark warnings about a new Scramble for Africa. Critics fret the United States - focused on the Middle East, the Asia-Pacific, the European Union and Russia - has made a strategic mistake.

As an array of international organizations, wealthy countries and charitable groups gear up to provide desperately needed resources to fight the outbreak, the absent doctors and volunteers are a reminder of the daunting practical obstacles. Many African health workers battling Ebola are contracting it themselves. At least 170 workers have gotten the disease, according to the World Health Organization, and more than 80 have died.

China and the United States are not alone in the game of summit diplomacy: The European Union has been hosting summit meetings with African leaders for nearly 10 years, while France and Japan have been at it for even longer; India joined the fray about five years ago. While it would be naïve to conclude that the burgeoning of Chinese engagements across Africa have not influenced the US response...

Sports diplomacy uses the universal passion for sports as a way to transcend linguistic and socio-cultural differences and bring people together, and has emerged as an integral part of efforts to build ever-strengthening relations between the United States and other nations. Accompanied by former NBA star Cedric Ceballos and Frank Traore from the NBA Africa office, we arrived first in Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo.

China's international reputation for humanitarian aid is among the worst of the globe's superpowers. As Quartz reports, the new shipment of millions of dollars in medical supplies and workers could be the beginnings of an attempt to reshape that reputation. Only 0.4% of China's foreign aid goes directly to humanitarian causes, rather that infrastructure projects or business efforts that could serve to improve nations' trade with China as much as it could help the nations themselves. In Africa, particularly, China's actions have appeared self-rewarding rather than altruistic.

So begins this year’s peace index, an annual report released by the nonprofit Institute for Economics and Peace. The study ranks 162 countries (covering 99.6% of the world’s population) according to a complex set of indicators that gauge the absence of violence and political instability. These include a nation’s level of military expenditure, its relations with neighboring countries and the percentage of the population held in prisons.

The summit, that brought together 50 heads of state, along with a range of US and African civil society and business leaders, is being seen as Washington's attempt to challenge China's status in Africa. Obama denied that the United States intends to compete with China for influence in Africa, however, he said that the relationship between the United States and China is not a zero-sum game.