ALSF partners on Procuring Infrastructure Public Partnerships
The African Legal Support Facility (ALSF) recognizes that many governments around the world have turned to public-private partnerships (PPPs) to design, finance, build, and operate infrastructure projects. It also appreciates that despite the presence of broadly known good practices and tools, governments around the world still fall behind in preparing, procuring, and managing effective public-private partnerships (PPPs) that meet the needs of their citizens.
To build relevant capacities and share experiences, the ALSF supported the development of a new report, Procuring Infrastructure PPPs 2018, which offers recommendations to governments to improve the quality of their regulations and better deliver infrastructure service through PPPs. Related to this, the ALSF was also involved in the dissemination process of the report, and in close partnership with the World Bank, the Facility organized a presentation of the report findings to the African Development Bank staff in Abidjan.
In sum, the report benchmarks the regulatory framework of 135 economies against international recognized good practices, scoring them on four elements: preparation, procurement, contract management, and treatment of unsolicited proposals. It found that the average performance of each of the categories varies across regions and income level, with OECD high- income economies and the Latin America and Caribbean region performing at or above average. In contrast, Sub-Saharan Africa and the East Asia and Pacific (EAP) region have the lowest average scores across thematic areas. EAP sees the greatest intraregional variance. Across the board, the report found that there are opportunities for improvement in PPP preparation and contract management.
