An alternative approach to infrastructure project development in Africa would be needed to address the significant infrastructure gap on the continent, International Finance Corporation (IFC) infrastructure and natural resources global director Sujoy Bose told delegates at the africainvestor (Ai) CEO Infrastructure Project Developers’ Summit, in Johannesburg.

He said current approaches to infrastructure project development within developing economies, were “not working to . . . full potential” and were not meeting the “unprecedented” demand for improved infrastructure services.

Investment was no longer the hurdle for infrastructure development, Bose said, stating that “there is . . . currently more private investment available for the African continent than what the sector in Africa can absorb”.

He argued that project development remained the most significant challenge to the development of infrastructure projects. “[However], governments, multilateral development banks and international agencies have made substantial efforts to coordinate and expand project development facilities.”

Bose stated that, despite the good work done to help advance infrastructure project development in Africa, it “failed to produce results on the scale required”, which was why a new approach to project development was required.

“Project development has to be replicable, scalable and financeable for us to make a dent in the infrastructure gap in Africa.”

He highlighted that, traditionally, project development facilities had primarily focused on individual projects, resulting in a lack of significant project development scale, owing to long cycle times for the design and procurement processes, gaps between governments’ concerns to ensure a defensible transaction and the private sector’s requirements to mitigate risks, as well as electoral cycle-times.

Bose noted that the IFC had observed positive results from countries adopting what he called a “wholesale and programmatic approach” to infrastructure project development.

He stated that this new approach not only allowed project development to take place on a larger scale, but would also reduce the time taken to initiate reforms to investment and new infrastructure construction.

The World Bank’s and IFC’s Scaling Solar programme, which was aimed at getting privately funded grid-connected projects operational within two years, was an example of the programmatic approach.

The programme was currently being employed in Zambia, Senegal and Madagascar.

Bose asserted that project developers would be able to develop project pipelines using the programmatic approach rather than focus on the development of a single project.