New Infrastructure Consortium for Africa is announced

17 June 2005

Infrastructure Consortium for Africa

Senior-level representatives from the G8, African Union, The New Partnership for Africa's Development (AU/NEPAD), African Development Bank, The Economic Community Of West African States (ECOWAS), the World Bank and the European Commission, met in London on May 5 to discuss infrastructure in Africa.

We recognised that infrastructure in Africa, is key to accelerating growth, reducing poverty and promoting regional integration. A step-change in approach is required to meet urgent needs and address the scale of the problem.

Concerted action between African institutions and donors, working with the private sector, is required. We agreed to work together to achieve more effective, larger scale activity behind priorities set by Africa, and to identify and overcome constraints, in a new co-operative spirit that recognises the comparative advantages of different donors.

We therefore agreed to establish an infrastructure consortium to work together, building on the valuable work already on-going.

The precise mechanics on how we will work together, and possible additional participants, will be discussed at the inaugural meeting of the consortium on 6 October 2005, in London.

Role of the consortium

We agreed a number of roles and criteria for the consortium:

• Effectiveness - poor coordination amongst donors remains a problem. Consortium members would press for action at the country-level and continue to advocate for full implementation of the Rome declaration, whilst encouraging partner countries to speed up their project ratification procedures.
• Advocacy and awareness - reflecting the scale of the problem a more effective response to Africa's infrastructure, including urging greater attention in country PRSs and other national development strategies.
• Coverage - the focus would be on continent-wide cross-border/regional projects and at the national level, the focus would be on sub-Saharan Africa.
• Sector - sectors to be covered are water and sanitation, energy, transport, telecommunications and urban infrastructure.
• Data - current baseline data on funding and activity levels is poor and there is an urgent need to establish who is doing what, where, with what money, so as to identify gaps, building on work already underway in NEPAD and the World Bank.
• Capacity building - capacity should be increased in areas responsible for current bottlenecks, particularly project preparation, where a plethora of facilities exist. Rationalisation of these facilities, and expansion if necessary, could also help increase effectiveness.
• Comparative advantage - respecting the comparative advantages and complementarity of different donors, and the appropriate type and mix of funding for different types of infrastructure is key, if more resources are to be mobilised and effectively used.
• Scaling up - responding to the need for urgent and larger scale activity by mobilising additional funds for infrastructure (noting that some donors have already made new commitments and that recent multilateral replenishments will provide some additional resources), and more effective use of existing sources of finance for feasible projects; and identifying funds in the near term for a number of priority projects.
• Monitoring - there is a need for monitoring of actions and outcomes, although detailed approaches were not discussed at this meeting.