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Shared-Use Infrastructure: A Prickly Partnership Takes Root, Perrine Toledano

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Only about 30% of Africa has access to electricity, and transport costs in Africa are among the highest in the world. For the World Bank, the annual funding gap for infrastructure investment in Africa is US $31 billion.

This gap however can be filled if the investments of natural resource concessionaires are leveraged and not planned in an enclave model. In resource-rich but infrastructure-poor Africa, natural resource concessionaires have traditionally developed railways, ports and power plants to serve their own needs. Africa has therefore often missed the opportunity of coordinating those large investments with national infrastructure planning and has failed …