Abdelmonem Fawzi
Africans will benefit a lot if they know the real needs of their continent.
It is easy to list these needs which vary. Nonetheless, modern, efficient and reliable infrastructure is the most important of these needs.
Africans face unprecedented economic, demographic, fiscal and environmental challenges that make it imperative for all leaders to give a chance to the public and the private sector to rethink the way they do business.
“Infrastructure is fundamentally important for development,” said AU Commissioner for Infrastructure and Energy, Amani Abou-Zeid. “No meaningful development has ever taken place without significant investments in infrastructure.”
Speaking during the 7th Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA) Week 2021 in Kenyatta International Conference Centre, Nairobi, which ended yesterday, Abou-Zeid added that this is going to be even more critical for recovery and resilience as this year’s theme highlights.
She noted that she was encouraged to observe that African Countries prioritised infrastructure development as more and more new projects were being unveiled.
“One could say that the continent is under construction,” Abou-Zeid said. “I witnessed construction after construction of one kind of infrastructure or another.” The AU heads of state and government, she said, provided clear leadership with respect to infrastructure development in Africa through the adoption of the second phase of PIDA projects at the summit in February 2021.
“The vision and the message are clear: Africa cannot continue to develop in a fragmented way through disjointed national inward-looking projects,” Abou-Zeid said. “PIDA provides the continent with a strategy and an opportunity to develop its infrastructure in a coherent and integrated manner that addresses the needed interconnectivity for people, goods and services to move the continent forward.”
She liked 69 PIDA PAP2 projects to the individual pieces of a large jigsaw puzzle.
Each piece, she said, is important for completing the picture.
In the case of PIDA, Abou-Zeid added, each project is important in closing a critical infrastructure gap.
She noted, however, that these infrastructure projects are not just brick and mortar or cables and steel.
“They are not only closing important physical gaps, but are also closing socio-economic ones.”
She said these projects open opportunities for jobs for African youth and corridors for trade across the continent under the Africa Continental Free Trade Area.
Each of the 69 projects was selected after fulfilling rigorous criteria.
One such criterion was to ensure that the projects bridge the gender divide and provide opportunities for women entrepreneurs.
“We do not want women to be left behind anymore when it comes to infrastructure,” Abou-Zeid said. “We also want to close the urban-rural divide through an integrated approach.”
The good news is that the African Union Commission, AUDA-NEPAD and other pan-African continental organisations work closely with regional organisations and national institutions to ensure that this mosaic of projects is implemented in a well-coordinated and timely manner.
Abou-Zeid commended the African Union High Representative for Infrastructure Development in Africa, Raila Odinga, for his relentless commitment in communicating the vision of integrated infrastructure development in the continent and his tireless efforts in unlocking bottlenecks and other challenges to ensure that PIDA projects are successful.
However, she said, the Covid-19 pandemic revealed the world’s dependence on digital infrastructure and technologies more than ever.
This infrastructure, she added, played a critical role in making communication, remote working, learning and business transactions possible during the pandemic-induced lockdowns.
“It also exposed the wider infrastructure gaps across Africa and the urgent need to prioritise and bridge the digital infrastructure gap in Africa, which is home to 21 of the 25 least-connected countries in the world,” Abou-Zeid said.
Meanwhile, AUDA-NEPAD CEO Ibrahim Assane Mayaki said after a two-year hiatus that this is the first physical PIDA Week since the last one in Cairo in 2019.
“This PIDA Week is testament to the human resolve to confront our challenges head-on, find solutions and work towards a better future for the next generation,” Mayaki said.
He added that the events of the past two years showed us how interconnected and dependent we are on each other, with events happening on one part of the globe affecting our global economic systems and way of life as we know it.
“Sadly, many lives have been lost due to Covid-19 and our economies have been negatively affected and the socio-economic challenges we face as a continent further exacerbated,” Mayaki said. “Never has the need for economic and social infrastructure been heightened than in the past two years, be it the need to maintain our supply chains to keep our economies running, or the need for our transport and logistics to get vaccines where they are needed.”
He referred to the need for hospitals to treat patients and the advances in ICT that have been essential in keeping industry and commerce running.
Mayaki also referred to the paramount importance of helping children maintaining their education, describing them as the ‘future of the continent’.
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