Thursday, 12 July 2012 00:00

The African Development Bank has estimated that the African continent  required an estimated $360-billion to implement basic regional backbone infrastructure across the continent by 2040.

Speaking at the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) inaugural Infrastructure Africa conference, in Sandton, the bank’s manager of regional integration and trade Ralph Olaye said on Tuesday that the current infrastructure deficit was costing the continent about 2 per cent gross domestic product (GDP) growth a year, as well as limiting intra-African trade, which currently stood at 12 per cent.
The implementation of sufficient African infrastructure, which was previously stated to be the least developed in the world, would increase the continent’s lagging competiveness in the global economy and lower the cost of doing business.

The 2012 to 2040 Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (Pida), a multibillion-dollar initiative led by the AfDB, the African Union and Nepad, aimed to develop a web of 37 200 km of highways, 30 200 km of railways and 16 500 km of interconnected power lines.
It also planned to add 20 101 hm3 to Africa’s current water storage capacity, 54 150 MW of hydroelectric power generation capacity and an extra 1.3-billion tons capacity at the ports.
This excluded the multibillion-dollar investments required to develop the national infrastructure linked to the basic regional backbone, to ensure full infrastructure coverage throughout Africa.
The investment would be funded through, besides others, domestic revenues or tax and revenues under an affordable user pays model.

Pida was the successor of Nepad’s medium- to long-term strategic framework, which ended in 2012, and focused on short-, medium- and long-term, current and future regional and continental infrastructure projects in transport, energy, information and telecommunications technologies.
The programme’s short-term priority action plan, to deal with more immediate infrastructure needs, comprised 51 regional and continental infrastructure projects to be implemented by 2020.
Pita also set medium-term aims, to be achieved by 2030, and long-term aims to be complete by 2040.
Olaye commented that over the next 30 years, infrastructure investment would need to accelerate and increase if it was to meet the expected 6.2 per cent GDP growth.

Further, Africa’s population was expected to double by 2040 to two-billion, and Pida hoped to create about 15-million jobs through construction, operation and maintenance of the projects. Olaye believed that millions more would be created indirectly through the increased economic activity generated through the projects.