Description:
The Africa Infrastructure Country
Diagnostic (AICD) has produced continent-wide analysis of
many aspects of Africa's infrastructure challenge. The
main findings were synthesized in a flagship report titled
Africa's Infrastructure: a time for transformation,
published in November 2009. Meant for policy makers, that
report necessarily focused on the high-level conclusions. It
attracted widespread media coverage feeding directly into
discussions at the 2009 African Union Commission Heads of
State Summit on Infrastructure. Although the flagship report
served a valuable role in highlighting the main findings of
the project, it could not do full justice to the richness of
the data collected and technical analysis undertaken. There
was clearly a need to make this more detailed material
available to a wider audience of infrastructure
practitioners. Hence the idea of producing four technical
monographs, such as this one, to provide detailed results on
each of the major infrastructure sectors, information and
communication technologies (ICT), power, transport, and
water, as companions to the flagship report. These technical
volumes are intended as reference books on each of the
infrastructure sectors. They cover all aspects of the AICD
project relevant to each sector, including sector
performance, gaps in financing and efficiency, and estimates
of the need for additional spending on investment,
operations, and maintenance. Each volume also comes with a
detailed data appendix, providing easy access to all the
relevant infrastructure indicators at the country level,
which is a resource in and of itself.