This book will be of interest to governments in the region and to multilateral and bilateral aid and lending agencies, as well as to graduate students, faculty, and researchers in African studies and transport studies. --Book Jacket.
Sustainable infrastructure development is vital for Africa s prosperity. And now is the time to begin the transformation. This volume is the culmination of an unprecedented effort to document, analyze, and interpret the full extent of the challenge in developing Sub-Saharan Africa s infrastructure sectors. As a result, it represents the most comprehensive reference currently available on infrastructure in the region. The book covers the five main economic infrastructure sectors information and communication technology, irrigation, power, transport, and water and sanitation. 'Africa s Infrastructure: A Time for Transformation' reflects the collaboration of a wide array of African regional institutions and development partners under the auspices of the Infrastructure Consortium for Africa. It presents the findings of the Africa Infrastructure Country Diagnostic (AICD), a project launched following a commitment in 2005 by the international community (after the G8 summit at Gleneagles, Scotland) to scale up financial support for infrastructure development in Africa. The lack of reliable information in this area made it difficult to evaluate the success of past interventions, prioritize current allocations, and provide benchmarks for measuring future progress, hence the need for the AICD. Africa s infrastructure sectors lag well behind those of the rest of the world, and the gap is widening. Some of the main policy-relevant findings highlighted in the book include the following: infrastructure in the region is exceptionally expensive, with tariffs being many times higher than those found elsewhere. Inadequate and expensive infrastructure is retarding growth by 2 percentage points each year. Solving the problem will cost over US$90 billion per year, which is more than twice what is being spent in Africa today. However, money alone is not the answer. Prudent policies, wise management, and sound maintenance can improve efficiency, thereby stretching the infrastructure dollar. There is the potential to recover an additional US$17 billion a year from within the existing infrastructure resource envelope simply by improving efficiency. For example, improved revenue collection and utility management could generate US$3.3 billion per year. Regional power trade could reduce annual costs by US$2 billion. And deregulating the trucking industry could reduce freight costs by one-half. So, raising more funds without also tackling inefficiencies would be like pouring water into a leaking bucket. Finally, the power sector and fragile states represent particular challenges. Even if every efficiency in every infrastructure sector could be captured, a substantial funding gap of $31 billion a year would remain. Nevertheless, the African people and economies cannot wait any longer. Now is the time to begin the transformation to sustainable development.
Transport prices for most African landlocked countries range from 15 to 20 percent of import costs. This is approximately two to three times more than in most developed countries. It is well known that weak infrastructure can account for low trade performance. Thus, it becomes necessary to understand what types of regional transport services operate in landlocked African nations and it is critical to identify the regulation disparities and provision anomalies that hurt infrastructure efficiency, even when the physical infrastructure, such as a road transport corridor, exists. Transport Prices and Costs in Africa analyzes the various reasons for poor transport performance seen widely throughout Africa and provides a compelling case for a number of national and regional reforms that are vital to the effort to address the underlying causes of high transport prices and costs and service unpredictability seen in Africa. The book will greatly help supervisory authorities throughout the region develop and implement a comprehensive transport policy that will facilitate long-term growth.
This book presents a comprehensive exploration of the state of infrastructure in Africa and provides an integrated analysis of the challenges the sector faces, based on extensive fieldwork across the continent, providing an important resource for researchers, students, policymakers and NGOs.
Using Africa as a context for research, new conceptual framing is proposed to make sense of the challenges of designing effective organizations to pursue socio-economic development.
Transport is an essential service that must contribute to national development objectives in health, education, agriculture and other sectors in guiding sub-Saharan Africa out of poverty. Developing policies aimed at providing safe, reliable and affordable transport infrastructure and services can and will make a substantial and sustainable contribution to eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, improving health care and reducing HIV/AIDS. Although transport is identified as a priority in poverty reduction strategies, it has not generally been adequately addressed. Global responses tend to focus on rural transport infrastructureâ "principally roadsâ "with little attention given to sub-sectors such as rivers, lakes, and railroads; and important geographical and econological differences are ignored. The needs of the urban poor have been weakly addressed, as have the access and mobility needs of women, the disabled and other disadvantaged groups, while strategies for adapting transport to agricultural production/distribution or social services (e.g. health and education) have not been adequately developed. A systematic approach to the development of sound, comprehensive transport sector programs that provide clear guidance on what is to be done is much needed. This volumeâ "the product of an expert workshop held at Cornell Universityâ (TM)s Institute for African Development in May, 2007â "provides accounts of an array of African operational spaces in which transport is relevant to the Millennium Development Goals. It addresses many heretofore ignored dimesions of transportâ "mobility issues of the urban poor, of women and children, and issues of access to employment, education and health services. It provides an alignment of transport with the MDGs in what proves to be fertile ground for research with important messages for policy makers and consequences for policy.
The paper investigates empirically the determinants of economic growth for a large sample of sub-Saharan African countries during 1981-92. The results indicate that (i) an increase in private investment has a relatively large positive impact on per capita growth; (ii) growth is stimulated by public policies that lower the budget deficit in relation to GDP (without reducing government investment), reduce the rate of inflation, maintain external competitiveness, promote structural reforms, encourage human capital development, and slow population growth; and (iii) convergence of per capita income occurs after controlling for human capital development and public policies.
This Handbook provides state-of-the-art scholarship in the emerging field of megaproject management. The 25 chapters cover all aspects of megaproject management, from front-end planning to project delivery, including how to deal with stakeholders, risk, finance, complexity, innovation, governance, ethics, project breakdowns, and scale itself.
Focusing on global value chains and their importance to trade, this edited collection explores the strategic role of logistics and supply chain infrastructure in the development of Africa. Skilled authors present critical analysis of the current state of logistics in Africa, and suggest improvements to policy and practice which address the issue of poor trading relationships. This book will engage entrepreneurs, academics and policy-makers interested in international business, raising awareness of the need for better trade infrastructure in Africa in order to ensure the continent’s economic development.
Africa's Power Infrastructure: Investment, Integration, Efficiency is based on the most extensive data collection exercise ever undertaken on infrastructure in Africa: the Africa Country Infrastructure Country Diagnostic (AICD). Data from this study have provided new insights on the extent of a power crisis in the region, characterized by insufficient capacity, low electricity connection rates, high costs, and poor reliabilityùand on what can be done about it. The continent faces an annual power sector financing gap of about $21 billion, with much of the existing spending channeled to maintain and operate high-cost power systems, leaving little for the huge investments needed to provide a long-term solution. Meanwhile, the power crisis is taking a heavy toll on economic growth and productivity. This book asserts that the current impediments to economic growth and development need to be tackled through policies and investment strategies that renew efforts to reform state-owned utilities, build on the lessons of private participation in infrastructure projects, retarget electrification strategies, expand regional power trade, and mobilize new funding resources. Further development of regional power trade would allow Africa to harness larger-scale and more cost-effective energy sources, reducing energy system costs by US$2 billion and carbon dioxide emissions by 70 million tons annually. But reaping the promise of regional trade depends on a handful of major exporting countries raising the large volumes of finance needed to develop generation capacity for export; it also requires a large number of importing countries to muster the requisite political will. With increased utility efficiency and regional power trade in play, power costs would fall and full cost recovery tariffs could become affordable in much of Africa. This will make utilities more creditworthy and help sustain the flow of external finance to the sector, which is essential to close the huge financing gap.