The African Development Bank hosted an online seminar on 7 October as part of the fourth annual Global Infrastructure Forum, drawing together representatives of government, the private sector and multilateral development institutions to discuss strengthening infrastructure development in the COVID-19 pandemic era.
The workshop titled, ‘Infrastructure Project Preparation: Ensuring Sustainability and Resilience Post COVID-19,’ took the form of a panel discussion on the critical roles that government, multilateral lenders and the private sector can play in building much-needed infrastructure in an economic climate made more challenging by the ongoing pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic has sharpened Africa’s already urgent need for added infrastructure spending with AfDB estimating that Africa’s infrastructure financing needs at $170bn a year by 2025, with an estimated financing gap of as much as $108bn a year.
The webinar panel comprised Lamine Lo, Director, Financing and PPPs in the Ministry of Economic Planning and Cooperation, Senegal; Solomon Quaynor, AfDB’s Vice President, Private Sector, Infrastructure & Industrialisation; Jerome Haegeli, Group Chief Economist and Managing Director, Swiss Re; and Dr. Srinivas Sampath, Chief of the PPP Thematic Group, Asian Development Bank.
Quaynor noted that African countries typically lacked the fiscal space of wealthier ones to cushion the pandemic’s impacts, adding that the pandemic poses a challenge also for institutions like the AfDB.
“We’re going to have to innovate, come up with better project preparation approaches, we’re going to have to design risk mitigation instruments because a lot of private sectors would not be willing to take the risk of government obligations without a counter-guarantee,” he stated.
