AFRICA NEWS
The International Finance Corporation( IFC) has partnered with Gaia Energy, which is a Moroccan company, to establish a joint platform for the development of wind power and renewable energy projects in Africa.
Confirming the news was Moundir Zniber, founder and president of the company, who said that IFC’ s expertise in financial structuring and mobilisation, as well as its environmental and social safeguards, ideally complements Gaia’ s tailor-made approach to developing projects in new markets like Africa.
The joint platform will be created by IFC InfraVentures, a USD150-million global infrastructure project development fund. The project will also be funded by a USD133-million Finland – IFC Blended Finance for Climate Programme.
The new platform will build a pipeline of 22 projects in nine African countries. Generally, renewable energy is a priority area identified in the World Bank Group’ s strategy, which will help in advancing the climate solutions led by the private sector.
IFC is a World Bank financial institution that encourages private-sector development in developing countries.
https:// cleantechnica. com
Gaia Energy has partnered with the International Finance Corporation for the development of renewable energy in Africa.
Speaking to construction industry stakeholders at a recent AfriSam breakfast briefing on the State of the South African Construction Industry, industry insight senior economist David Metelerkamp said that the civils sector was bearing the brunt of the construction downturn, and companies reported the worst levels of confidence since the early 1990s.
“ Over the past 18 months, there has been a significant decline in the value of tenders awarded,” he says, pointing to a 26 % decrease in the value of projects over the past year.
He highlighted that order books across the civils sector remain flat, and even dropped in recent months, possibly as a result of President Cyril Ramaphosa’ s planned clean-up of the state-owned enterprises which had in some instances delayed expenditure. But he saw more efficient SOEs as a positive factor in the medium- to long term for civils.
“ Conditions will remain tough this year, which will possibly be the worst year for the civils sector,” he said,“ but we are expecting some improvement next year and the following year.”
The civils sector had experienced poor annual growth levels for many years up to 2016, after which its performance had worsened further with five consecutive quarters of negative growth. Some good news came recently with Energy Minister Jeff Radebe’ s interventions to progress 27 independent power producer agreements; Metelerkamp noted that civils contractors would have to rely more on private sector contracts like these. There might also be good news in store as the next national election looms, with an election run-up often coinciding with the issuing of more government tenders.
In the interests of transforming the sector, government has also been breaking up large infrastructure projects into smaller pieces, to allow greater access by small contractors; these smaller players have therefore taken over a substantial portion of market share from larger contractors.
AfriSam’ s chief executive officer Rob Wessels emphasised the positive role that construction plays in creating employment. Wessels said that while construction contributes around 3 % of gross domestic product, it employs roughly 9 % of South Africa’ s labour force. The sector employs about 1.4 million of South Africa’ s total workforce of about 16.3-million people.
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OCTOBER 2018