Ai CEO Infrastructure Project Developers Summit 2016
I am very pleased to be here today, let me start by thanking Hubert Danso and the Africa investor team for putting this event together which is sponsored by IFC InfraVentures. We have lots of experts, project development infrastructure specialists and executives here and certainly have a very distinguished panel and I’m very pleased to be moderating this panel.
I am Alain Ebobissé, in my current capacity I am the Global Head for IFC InfraVentures which is the project development outfit of IFC and indeed the World Bank Group. We operate globally with two regions of focus; Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. In Africa we are very excited to be active in the project development arena and in sub-Saharan Africa we had a few successes but also number of challenges, I’m sure we will discuss both successes and challenges today during this conference.
One of the successes that I am very proud of is the power project in Senegal that we have developed and helped to finance and now the project has achieved commercial operations. We went through the full cycle of developing, financing and building the power plant; the plant is now delivering power to the population in Senegal. In fact the government is so happy that they have decided to award an additional project to the same team together with an expansion of the power project. However we also have a number of challenges that we’re facing, one of the projects that we are developing with Aldwych in Tanzania is one such project that is going through some challenges and maybe Helen will talk about it. Nonetheless project development is exciting but also very challenging.
We all know that Africa has been facing some head winds, I think you may have seen the latest estimates from the World Bank and IMF in terms of the slow economic growth in in sub-Saharan Africa in 2015. Talking about 3% – 3.5% when in 2014 the growth was much higher (4% – 4.5% +). We also see a number of security concerns and so there are a number of head winds.
Finally I am transitioning out from my role at IFC InfraVentures to take over Africa50 as the Chief Executive Officer. This is an investment platform that was set up by a number of African governments and the African Development Bank – so another challenging assignment but quite exciting and again in the infrastructure space in Africa.
The Business of Project Development
As an industry of course there is no one number that fits all but some ranges of what developers should expect to make. It’s important that we communicate some of those principles so that lenders will not always be fighting us as developers. I’ve heard that for this project development business to be successful, one has to make the money back plus one/two/three times, potentially in terms of the development premium. So I want people to comment on that to see whether this is outrageous, if it is reasonable or not; and the development fee in terms of percentage of project costs.
Watch the full video here
