Infrastructure Consortium for Africa
The inaugural meeting of the Infrastructure Consortium for Africa (ICA) was held in London on 6 October 2005 and included representation from key African institutions and donors.
The Consortium is a major new effort to accelerate progress to meet the urgent infrastructure needs of Africa in support of economic growth and development. It will address both national and regional constraints to infrastructure development, with an emphasis on regional infrastructure recognising the particular challenges at this scale. However the consortium will also engage at the country level, since most infrastructure services are addressed at the national level, within national budgets and implementation frameworks and issues of harmonisation also need to be addressed at this scale.
The consortium is intended to make its members more effective at supporting infrastructure in Africa by pooling efforts in selected areas (such a information sharing, project development, and good practice) without necessarily pooling financing decisions. Although the Consortium is not a financing agency, the Consortium would act as a platform to broker more donor financing of infrastructure projects and programmes in Africa (AfDB). Nevertheless, the success of the Consortium will be judged by concrete action and outcomes in terms of the quantity and quality of sustainable infrastructure services delivered to Africa’s people and the resultant development benefits.