Press Release: ICA 9th Annual Meeting - A Big Success
27 November 2013
9th Annual Meeting of the Infrastructure Consortium for Africa – A Big Success.
November 20, 2013 - Tunis: The Infrastructure Consortium for Africa (ICA) held its 9th Annual Meeting in Arusha, Tanzania. This year marked an anniversary for this ICA – as the conference was co-sponsored by the original host: The United Kingdom and co-sponsored by the African Development Bank – and was held at the beautiful new East Africa Community Headquarters in downtown Arusha, Tanzania.
The official outcome statement for the 9th Annual ICA meeting will be developed over the next few weeks and posted on the ICA website (www.icafrica.org). We can, however, report that ICA members renewed, and in most cases increased their financial contributions to the ICA Secretariat – allowing the ICA Secretariat to produce valuable knowledge products, publications and tools to boost infrastructure investment in Africa.
“... This years’ annual ICA exceeded our expectations ...” said, ICA Coodinator, Mohamed Hassan. “... Our members demonstrated a solid commitment to the goals and objectives of the ICA – and we also had the opportunity to officially welcome a new [G20] member... so things are moving in the right direction...”
To start the two and half day meetings, the ICA hosted an African Stakeholders meeting on November 12th, where representatives from regional economic communities, banks and various organizations and institutions made presentations and discussed a wide array of infrastructure issues.
ICA Members Meeting: The ICA hosted an all-day Members Meeting on Wednesday, November 13th. The co-host representative and meeting chairperson from United Kingdom opened the meeting. In attendance were representatives from The European Investment Bank, Germany, Canada, France, The United States, Russia, Japan, Great Britain, China, South Africa and The World Bank. This closed meeting of ICA members and invited observers welcomed South Africa as the first G20 member, then spent the day discussing an ICA strategic business plan, getting up-dates on the ICA infrastructure sector accomplishments and learning about various ICA member initiatives.
ICA Plenary Session: The Plenary Session opened on Thursday, November 14th. The theme for this years’ 2013 plenary discussion was: Boosting African Trade: Cross Border Harmonization of Transport Regulation and Policy. Rachel Turner, Regional Director for Africa at DFID, UK made opening remarks, followed by Dr. Richard Sezibera, The Secretary General for the EAC, and Dr Aboubakari Baba-Moussa, Director of Infrastructure at the AUC. The meeting was officially opened by Hon. Samual John Sitta, (MP), the Tanzanian Minister for the EAC.Experts in cross-border transport regulation and policy presented interesting findings and analysis and the conference was extremely well attended. The issue of transport regulation and policy in Africa was discussed at length with panelists – and there was active participation from the audience members.
Launched at the G8 Gleneagles Summit in 2005, the role of the Infrastructure Consortium for Africa (ICA) is to help improve the lives and economic well-being of Africa’s people through encouraging, supporting and promoting increased investment in infrastructure in Africa, from both public and private sources. Using its convening power, ICA acts as a catalyst – enhancing, accelerating and precipitating the development of Africa’s infrastructure.
ICA also works to help remove some of the technical and policy challenges and barriers to building more infrastructure and to better co- ordinate the activities of its members and other significant sources of infrastructure finance, such as China, India and Arab partners.
For additional information about the ICA, please contact Susan Wood at: S.WOOD@afdb.org
Category: General News