Africa urged to engage in partnership without borders... to help accelerate infrastructure development

The Vice President of Ghana, H.E. John Dramani Mahama, has called on the West African sub region and the continent as a whole to engage in partnership without borders to help accelerate infrastructure development within the continent.

“Perhaps, Africa's history lends to its need to think regionally more so than nationally. Was it not the colonial leaders that drew the borders upon the map separating people into nations? As Africa moves forward in the right direction, it is only logical to revisit our roots and engage in partnership without borders.”

This was contained in a speech read on his behalf on the occasion of the 6th annual West African Power Industry Convention under the theme: 'Driving West African Regional growth through development of industrial infrastructure', in Accra yesterday.

The conference brought together leading government representatives from West African economies to pool ideas and make recommendation on the region's power and infrastructure development and to explore investment opportunities in the region.

The Vice President noted that a recent assessment of Africa's infrastructure has revealed that less than one-third of sub-Saharan Africa have access to reliable electricity supply; with less than 50% having access to clean water supply, and about 60 % of Africa's population lacks basic sanitation facilities.

He also attributed lack of planning, weak management capability, poor maintenance, high cost of infrastructure projects as some of the major causes of the low infrastructure development of Sub-Saharan Africa, and an impediment to the achievement of the millennium development goals.

“As we strive to achieve our vision for our economies within the ECOWAS framework, it is important that we consolidate our efforts towards the realization of regional integration initiatives such as the West Africa Power Pool and the West African Gas Pipeline Project. It is equally important that we develop our human resource base to be able to manage and properly maintain huge investments that we are making in infrastructure development in West Africa,” he said.

He further noted that Ghana has set the goal of increasing its power generation installed capacity from the current level of about 2,000 MW to 5,000MW by 2015. “Recognising the huge investment required to achieve this objective, we are encouraging the private sector to invest in the power generation business in Ghana.”

He also noted that the government of Ghana, on its part, has put in place plans to construct about 1000MW of energy (both hydro and thermal), whilst power sales agreements have been concluded between public electric utilities and independent power producers for the IPPs to install over 1000MW power generation facilities.