Toward an African Infrastructure Strategy to Meet the Needs of the Poor

This last chapter draws some lessons from the issues raised in the previous chapters that should be relevant to the design of an infrastructure policy that would include a focus on the poor directly (through prices, subsidies, and technological choices) or indirectly (through an organization of the sector that ensures that services are delivered at the lowest possible costs). The idea is to contribute to the public debate as the international community designs the next wave of reforms for Africa’s infrastructure sectors, given that the reforms of the last two decades have not delivered a big enough bang for the buck and certainly not for the large number of poor in Africa. The poor have not seen their fair share of many of the improvements when such improvements have been observed. The only sector that can be labeled a reasonable success story is telecom but this success can largely be credited to a technological revolution rather than to major institutional reforms in the region.