Inclusive growth has always been the intersection of China and Africa’s common interests and visions, and is an important direction for future development. Based on the quasi-natural experiment of the establishment of the China-Africa Overseas Economic and Trade Cooperation Zone, this paper explores the causal relationship between the establishment of the cooperation zone and the inclusive growth of the host country based on the inclusive growth index system proposed by the World Economic Forum. The study found that the establishment of the cooperation zone has a significant inclusive growth effect, which is established in robustness tests such as parallel trend test and dual machine learning. The inclusive growth effect of cooperation zones is more obvious in northern Africa, countries with high income levels, high inequality and low cultural distance, especially in cooperation zones that pass assessments and cooperation zones that are invested by state-owned enterprises. Further, the synergistic eff ect test of the characteristic factors of the cooperation zone and the host country shows that there is a linkage eff ect between the quality of the system and the cooperation zone, while the natural resources do not show this eff ect; by using the Oaxaca-Blinder model to decompose the inclusive growth, it is found that the layout of “multi-park group” makes the inclusive growth faster. The research results provide empirical evidence for the cooperative zone to become a new engine of economic growth and poverty reduction in Africa, and also have important implications for China and Africa to jointly promote inclusive growth.