Policy Makers and leading experts in Infrastructure debated and championed delivery of Africa’s critical infrastructure requirements, while providing expert advice on the current state of infrastructure and the anticipated impact of future development at the African Strategic Infrastructure Initiative Working Group Meeting yesterday in Sandton, Johannesburg.

While infrastructure demand is growing, public financing has become more difficult to obtain. To deal with this, the World Economic Forum on Africa brought together 35 companies, multilateral development banks, NGOs and regional experts and organisations to form the African Strategic Infrastructure Initiative Working Business Working Group (BWG). This group is meant to add private-sector perspective to the process of accelerating implementation of the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA) Priority Programmes.

The BWG has developed a methodology to identify and prioritize PIDA projects from private sector prespective that may benefit from accelerated development up to the tendering process. This methodology is intended to accelerate private-sector involvement in infrastructure in Africa and provide a model that can be replicated and scaled up across continents.

Participants at the BWG meeting

Through research the BWG chose the Central Corridor as a model to replicate where innovative approach is followed for its acceleration involving an early finance, capacity development and project preparation.  The structured approach followed will be useful to replicate to address the complex implementation of large infrastructure PIDA.

The BWG meeting provided an overview of the methodology applied and the progress to date in the central corridor, which covers the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi and Tanzania. “We want to make the central corridor the trade route of choice in east Africa to facilitate travel for people and goods across the borders.” said Mrs Rukia Shamte, Executive Secretary of the Central Corridor Transit Transport Facilitation Agency.

Prof. Mosad Elmissiry making a presentation on the progress made on implementation of PIDA

In recognising the need of having the proper financing and the right capacity to implement the PIDA projects Professor Mosad Elmissiry, head of NEPAD Energy Programme, in his opening remarks urged participants to come up with innovative approaches for accelerating the PIDA Implementation through smart public private partnership and innovative early project finance to bankability. “The NEPAD Agency as the implementing body of PIDA, welcomes inputs  form the business community that will lead to the acceleration of implementation of PIDA high priorty projects ”

The meeting also provided a platform to brainstorm on ideas of improving private sector financing, more particularly through the Africa50 fund as well as closing the communications gap between the countries, project owners and investor through online platforms such as the Africa Infrastructure Database and the Virtual PIDA Information Portal.

In closing, Mr Symmerre Grey-Johnson, Head of NEPAD Domestic Resource Mobilisation, emphasised the need to better communicate the work being done by the BWG for improved public and private sector buy-in.

The outcomes of meeting will feed into the finalisation of the pilot project in time for the Investors forum to mobilise private sector participation in the Central Corridor set to take place in March 2015.