RIO DE JANEIRO — In Mozambique, Brazil’s government isopening a plant making antiretroviral drugs to fight the AIDS epidemic. Brazil is lending $150 million to Kenya to build roads and ease congestion in the capital, Nairobi. And in Angola, West Africa’s rising oil power, a new security agreement seeks to expand the training of Angolan military personnel in Brazil.

Brazil, which has more people of African descent than any other country outside of Africa itself, is assertively raising its profile again on the continent, building on historical ties from the time of the Portuguese empire.

The array of aid projects and loans recently extended to African countries points both to Brazil’s ambitions of projecting greater influence in the developing world and to the expanding business allure of Africa, where some economies are rapidly growing even as parts of the continent still grapple with wars and famine. The charm offensive is paying off in surging trade flows between Brazil and Africa, growing to $27.6 billion in 2011 from $4.3 billion in 2002.

“There’s the growing sense that Africa is Brazil’s frontier,” said Jerry Dávila, a historian at the University of Illinois who has written extensively about Brazil’s
inroads across the South Atlantic Ocean. “Brazil is in the privileged position of finally reaching the institutional capacity to do this.”

Brazil’s forays into Africa are similar to the ambitions of other rising powers, like Turkey, which has established its sway in the Arab world, and India’s promotion of its culture across Asia.

The prominence given to Africa also reflects Brazil’s shift from aid recipient to provider. Big development challenges persist in Brazil, including woeful public
schools and a sharp economic slowdown this year. But Brazil is a major agricultural exporter that recently surpassed Britain as the world’s sixth-largest economy, and it now boasts more embassies in Africa than Britain does — a notable change from when Brazil relied on foreign aid in the 1960s, largely from the United States, to alleviate hunger in the country’s impoverished northeast.

Africa now accounts for about 55 percent of the disbursements by the Brazilian Cooperation Agency, which oversees aid projects abroad, according to Marco Farani, the agency’s director. Altogether, including educational exchanges and an expanding loan portfolio, Brazil’s foreign aid exceeds $1 billion, he said. Big portions of Brazilian aid also go to countries in Latin America, and there is a smaller focus on East Timor, the former Portuguese colony in Southeast Asia.