Workshop: OECD-AfDB Seminar on Investment in African Infrastructure

The IGC jointly organised the OECD-AfDB seminar on resolving policy impediments to private investment in African infrastructure.

Discussions related to fostering private investment into Africa’s infrastructure have multiplied in recent years. There is widespread recognition that the continent’s infrastructure gap is growing, and that African governments cannot afford to bridge this gap through tax revenues and aid alone. But, although investment opportunities are plentiful, investors are not yet fully seizing them.

In this context, and drawing on experiences from a range of developing countries, this seminar investigated how changes made in policy areas at national, regional and international levels can help generate more and better private investment in Africa’s infrastructure.

It focussed on three concrete areas of public policy:

• Better regulation in both home and host countries, to unlock the supply of finance for infrastructure projects;
• A proactive approach to managing risks across the project cycle; and
• Using public risk-bearing capital more effectively to leverage private investment in infrastructure.

The seminar brought together institutional investors, representatives of host governments (including PPP practitioners), infrastructure utility companies, regional organisations, the international banking sector, and bilateral and multilateral development finance institutions.

This seminar follows on from the Roundtable on Stimulating Private Investment in Infrastructure in Africa and South Asia, hosted by the International Growth Centre in February 2014, where participants sought to clarify the spectrum of risks and the systemic organisational failures that are hampering greater investment flows into these regions’ infrastructure.