The Civil Engineering Contractor March 2019 | Page 16

INFRA AFRICA
ALL AFRICA
How African countries
compare in ease of
doing business
Forbes has rated the business
friendliness of the world’s
biggest economies annually
for the past 13 years.
Despite the uncertainty
surrounding Brexit, the
UK ranked first for the
second straight year on the
strength of its workforce,
innovation, and lack of
red tape.
Forbes determined the
Best Countries for Business
by rating 161 nations on
15 varied factors, namely
property rights, innovation,
taxes,
tec hnology,
corruption, infrastructure,
market size, political risk,
quality of life, workforce,
freedom (personal, trade,
and monetary), red tape,
and investor protection.
Each category was equally
weighted.
14 | CEC March 2019
Forbes’
Best
Country
for Business ranks the
major African economies
as follows:
• South Africa
(ranked 59 th )
• Morocco (62)
• Seychelles (66)
• Tunisia (82)
• Botswana (83)
• Rwanda (90)
• Kenya (93)
• Ghana (94)
• Egypt (95)
• Namibia (96)
• Senegal (100)
• Zambia (103)
• Cape Verde (104)
• Nigeria (110).
The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam will be the
largest dam in Africa when it is completed.
EAST AFRICA
ETHIOPIA
Ethiopia’s Nile dam delayed to 2022
Possible defects in electro-mechanical work carried out by a now-disgraced
state-owned company in Ethiopia will add four more years to the construction
schedule of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), a project official
said in January. According to official estimates, the dam is 65% complete. It
is Ethiopia’s most important project and will transform the country’s energy
profile by adding 6.4GW to its generating capacity.
A senior government minister rued as a “grave mistake” the appointment of
the military-run conglomerate, Metal and Engineering Corporation (Metec),
which was handed a USD853-million contract in 2011 (reports Reuters) to
install turbines and other electrical and mechanical work under the dam’s main
contractor, Italy’s Salini Impregilo.
“We have a plan to generate power from the first two units within the
coming two years, and then probably the dam will be completed in the year
2022,” the dam’s construction manager, Kifle Hora, told the Associated Press
(AP). Experts were assessing equipment for possible defects and would devise
remediation plans. Metec was fired from the project in August over delays to
the M&E work, following complaints from Salini Impregilo.
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