Infrastructure Cycles Phase II

At the 18th International Economic Forum on Africa, the President of Ghana, His Excellency Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, called on the OECD Development Centre (DEV) and the African Center for Economic Transformation (ACET) to establish a technical platform on infrastructure and skills development. ACET and OECD DEV, working with African and global partners, implemented the first phase of an initiative funded by GIZ/BMZ to identify areas for speeding up processes for preparing, funding and implementing infrastructure projects in Africa, while meeting the quality challenge at the same time. The key outputs from Phase I were (i) Four cases studies of recent or active infrastructure projects in Africa; (ii) Creation of a High-Level Think Group, and a Senior Technical Experts Group for three global policy dialogues; and (iii) a final report, Accelerating and Scaling Up Quality Infrastructure in Africa (link) launched in July, 2020. The report recommended that a second phase be initiated with the objective is to: • To promote the use of the PIDA quality label for all infrastructure projects across Africa, thus ensuring a consistent quality level in all African infrastructure projects • To create an African Community of Practice (COP) of African infrastructure practitioners and a platform for knowledge sharing and peer learning. In Q1 2021, ACET received funding for an interim phase to develop implementation plans for both recommendations. These were submitted as part of the communicate for discussion at the AU Heads of State Summit in February 2021. An interim project manager and consultant were also onboarded to complete this work. The initiative was featured at the OECD Africa Forum in Feb 2021 For Q2 2021, ACET supported and participated in the “High Level Technical Meeting for Infrastructure Project Cycles on April 15, ahead of the Summit on Financing African Economies. Likewise, the Infrastructure Project Cycles initiative was endorsed at the Summit on Financing African Economies. The summit launched a multilateral effort will be closely articulated with the network of African Public Development Banks (PDBs), mobilizing the African Development Bank (AfDB) as well as sub-regional and national public financial institutions to originate more quality projects notably for climate, health, education, infrastructure and the private sector. For Q3 2021 Phase II Planning: In parallel to the fundraising efforts, the team is in the process of developing key project documents such as Partner Roles & Responsibilities, TOR for the Advisory Board and Project Briefs. The team has also engaged ACET’s communications team to explore the possibility of hosting the Infrastructure database and platform on the ACET website.