Africa’s Infrastructure Investment Needs

For anyone traveling to Africa, the physical evidence of an infrastructure gap is hard to deny. Demand is unmet and this is also what is shown by models estimated to explain why SSA is growing, trading, and reducing its poverty less than it should. The natural follow-up question should then be how much does Africa need to allocate to the infrastructure sectors to meet its growth, trade, and social targets. There are a number of approaches to measure these investment needs in any given sector. The most common approach at the sector level is a bottom-up approach in which information collected at the local level can be added up to get a sense of the total figure needed. In that context, investment requirements are assessed for each sector for a targeted coverage rate, for a given service quality level at a standard local or an international best-practice cost. This type of effort had been conducted for the water MDGs in 2003 but it had not been done for the other infrastructure sectors until recently. One of the main contributions of the AICD study has been to update the estimations for the water sector in 2008 and to conduct similar assessments for a very wide definition of infrastructure needs. Readers interested in the details of the approaches followed for each sector are invited to read the summary report of that study.1