Policy Makers and leading experts in infrastructure debated and championed delivery of Africa’s critical infrastructure requirements at the African Strategic Infrastructure Initiative Working Group Meeting this week 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 prospective 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.

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 priority projects”

The meeting also provided a platform to brainstorm ideas for 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.