Financing African Infrastructure

Brookings published in March 2015 a major report titled "Financing African Infrastructure: Can the World Deliver?" by Jeffrey Gutman, Amadou Sy, and Soumya Chattopadhyay, all at Brookings. 

The report begins with the premise that nowhere is lack of infrastructure more crucial and potentially transformational than in sub-Saharan Africa.  The three major sources of external financing are: private participation in infrastructure investments; official development finance from multilateral institutions and most of the OECD-DAC donors; and official Chinese financing.  The top recipients in sub-Saharan Africa of external financing in 2009-2012 were South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Ethiopia.

This report offers recommendations on how to better exploit the political, technical, and financial synergies needed to address the infrastructure gap.