Region: Sub-Saharan Africa
Country: Congo, Rep.
Sector: Telecom and ICT
Keywords: Knowledge Lab, Telecom and ICT
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Document Summary:
This paper delineates the role of government in Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) in the telecommunication sector in the Republic of the Congo. PPPs offer policy makers an opportunity to improve the delivery of services and the management of facilities, and help to mobilize private capital which in turn speeds up the delivery of public infrastructure. Along with power and transportation infrastructure projects, telecommunication figures among the most growing area in PPP projects in Africa. Nevertheless, fitting telecommunication projects into a PPP model is challenging. In order to address these challenges, this paper also summarizes the achievements in Congo's economic infrastructure sector, the risks allocated to the implementation of the project, and recommends World Bank Group risk mitigation instruments.
Document Details:
Telecommunication is a traditional public sector responsibility that today is more often offered by private sector investors and operators. The scarcity of funding available in public sector, coupled with an increasing demand in the dynamic technology outputs is giving increasing advantage to private firms. Yet the government retains certain critical responsibilities in the sector such as regulation; in some sub-sectors (e.g. broadband), the public sector may continue to have primary investment responsibility due to significant market failures that inhibit private investment. Public-Private Partnership (PPP) projects provide an opportunity for development of telecommunication infrastructure without placing the full burden of the ultimate financial demands on the public balance sheet. They also allow the operator to spread the cost of infrastructure over time, rather than requiring a considerable up-front capital expenditure.
This paper delineates the role of government in infrastructure PPPs in telecommunication sector in the Republic of Congo. Besides its critical role in promoting universal access at this time of convergence and the edge of information technologies, PPPs offer policy makers an opportunity to improve the delivery of services and the management of facilities and helps to mobilize private capital which in turn speeds up the delivery of public infrastructure. Along with power and transportation infrastructures projects, telecommunication figures among the most growing areas in PPP projects in Africa.
Nevertheless, fitting telecommunication projects into a PPP model can be quite challenging, therefore this paper also summarize the achievements and challenges in Congo’s ICT economic infrastructure sector, the capital investment needs in the broadband sub-sector (budgetary valuation of transnational and international networks) and risk allocated to the implementation of the project and proposes the World Bank Group risk mitigation instruments.
Numerous forms of PPPs have been developed worldwide to respond to the various fields of application. The Public-Private Infrastructure Advisory Facility (PPIAF) has presented the major categories of PPP in a simplified way in the figure below, in which the extent of private sector participation increases from left to right. The paper suggests the most common PPP instruments and put forward the Open Access Network (OAN). This model represents a very different approach compare to the traditional one because the single network is shared among many different service providers, reducing costs of services for service providers as well as to customers. Important tool for economic development, OAN promotes universal access of technology to the entire population by including citizen into the active participation of their community development.
Updated: June 17, 2022