Can the Addis Ababa Action Agenda Bring about a More Integrated Blend? Facilitating African Infrastructure Development Through Institutionalized Portfolio Approaches

Abstract

This article makes the case that greater institutionalization of risk-reducing portfolio approaches will be necessary to enhance the future integration of blending efforts in the African infrastructure sector. Private sector investments and emerging economy integration have remained unresolved bottlenecks that have plagued the development debate since the Busan High Level Forum for Aid Effectiveness in 2011. Development Finance Institutions, who were mandated to deal with these bottlenecks and became the primary blending actors for many development agencies, failed, however, to drive broad stakeholder participation, especially in low-income countries. This article therefore argues that blending approaches can help overcome these limitations if they are pushed to a new level by focusing on greater institutionalization. It develops an analytic framework that assesses the factors for success for integrated blending and then applies these factors to a string of recent and more institutionalized portfolio approaches that have been developed to support African infrastructure development. Our research finds, however, that there remain significant problems with these current efforts and asks what role the Global Infrastructure Forum, which was established by the July 2015 Addis Ababa Action Agenda, could play in providing pathways out of these stated bottlenecks.

Keywords:

• infrastructure
• Africa
• blending
• donor
• Addis Action Agenda
• portfolio approach

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Bert Jacobs is a PhD student from the University of Antwerp. His research focusses on African regional integration in the infrastructure sector, with a special focus on the African Union’s Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA).