Stakeholders mobilised to accelerate the implementation of priority regional infrastructure projects at the Dakar Financing Summit for Africa’s Infrastructure last weekend.

The summit, titled Unleashing Africa’s infrastructure potential, has produced the Dakar Agenda for Action, which identifies infrastructure development as a key driver and a critical enabler for sustainable growth in Africa and speaks to how the continent’s public and private sector will partner with other development players to ensure financing and investment for 16 key regional infrastructure projects in energy, transport and ICT.

The projects fall under Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA) which was at the centre of discussion at the two day Summit in Senegal’s capital. PIDA is a continental infrastructure development blueprint set out by NEPAD, the Africa Development Bank and the African Union. Currently in its implementation phase, it is designed to address the infrastructural deficit that hampers Africa’s competitiveness on the world market through regional and continental projects. This Dakar Financing Summit marks the beginning of a process of bringing the 16 projects to fruition.

“This Dakar Financing Summit is a response to the challenge of poor infrastructure and our vision to overcome the situation,” said Carlos Lopes, Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa. He explained that the summit marks the end of a process that started with the NEPAD heads of state and government meeting and who, upon learning that the continent generates the bulk of its current infrastructure financing, requested a NEPAD/ECA study on mobilising additional domestic resources to fund regional projects. “It is combination of the outcome of that study and the trimming of fifty-one projects in the PIDA Priority Action Plan to the 16 projects that has brought us here on today.”

Lopes believes that by focusing on pre-selected projects and bringing relevant private and public sector together, the summit can be the pathway to bringing all the other PIDA projects to fruition.

According to Lopes, various options and sources have been identified for mobilising the required investment in the continent including infrastructure and diaspora bonds, pension and sovereign wealth funds, and foreign exchange reserves. A major proposal made in this regard is the creation of the Africa 50 Fund in the African Development Bank.

“An equally important plank is the policy, legal and regulatory environment required to underpin investment in infrastructure,” Lopes pointed out. “Given the lumpiness of infrastructure investments and related time-frames for them to pay their way, a stable and enabling regulatory regime is required. The findings however are that policy, legal and regulatory constraints are the single most important constraint in project preparation, finance and execution. This is valid both at the national especially at the regional level. Issues of concern relate to inadequacies and divergences of legal systems, limited investment guarantee and investment promotion, inadequate technical capacities as well as well known perception bias of political instability and corruption.”

Chairperson of the NEPAD Business Foundation Stanley Subramoney said that the private sector was more determined than ever to support infrastructural growth in Africa. “Africa is rising, ready and open for business,” he said.