Dakar (Senegal), 25 March 2017 (ACBF-AUC-ECA) - Every government and development stakeholder in Africa knows the critical role infrastructure plays for the continent’s transformation, yet focus on the right systems and capacities for planning and coordinating infrastructure development to transform Africa has been somewhat missing. This was a common position of high-level panelists and attendees of an African Development Week 2017 event to reflect on how the continent can better manage and coordinate Large Scale Infrastructure Projects for Development Planning.
From the discussions, one serious setback to leveraging infrastructure for Africa’s development that came up, was the acute lack of capacity to raise capital to finance key projects.
“Africa continues to grapple with insufficient skills to develop bankable project proposals, the capacity to mobilize financial partners, establishing legal frameworks and allocating risk in a manner that is conducive to the prevailing macroeconomic conditions” said Prof. Emmanuel Nnadozie who heads the continent’s foremost capacity development coordinating institution – the African Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF – www.acbf-pact.org).
He substantiated his point with findings of a 2016 ACBF study, which showed that Africa could only boast of a 3 per cent share of global financial credit made available for infrastructure projects. From a whopping US$2 trillion raised globally for financing infrastructure projects, only US$ 59 billion was doled out to Africa, not because the continent was comfortable with the levels of its infrastructure but because of its lack of bankable projects to attract more funds from that global pot.
Also speaking during the event, the Director of the Capacity Development Division of UN Economic Commisison for Africa (ECA www.uneca.org) – Dr. Stephen Karingi, revisited the point made on the lack of capacity to put together bankable projects but said “it gets further complicated when dealing with complex and transboundary infrastructural projects with disparate capabilities on different sides of borders that are difficult to harness.” He said a key formula for easing the capacity gaps was for partners such as ACBF, AUC and ECA to channel proper support to infrastructure planning units across African States.
Two experts who led a study commissioned by ABCF, AUC and ECA on “Managing and Coordinating Large Scale Infrastructure Projects for Development Planning in Africa” edified various stakeholders in attendance on the issues African countries need to resolve to leverage infrastructure for development. These, they said, include: monitoring and evaluating, harmonizing legal frameworks, political leadership as well as knowledge generation and sharing.
Participants evoked the need for project designers to engage parliament, to draw lessons from what has worked elsewhere, to seek for better public-private partnerships, to involve regional bodies more deeply into infrastructure project planning and to improve on the costing of such projects.
