 Two years ago, we sat in this room in front of maybe some of you where we gave an update on an initiative that launched in 2012 on the African Strategic Infrastructure Initiative. I'd like to thank you for all joining to hear the update on this. It's at the end of a three-year period. I know we have many people online that are viewing this as well, so welcome and we thank you for your interest. This press conference is to give you an update on what we've now done. Two years ago, we made a commitment as a group of leaders that we would work together, public-private cooperation to help accelerate infrastructure implementation in Africa. I'm very pleased that in today's press conference, we have a very distinguished set of guests and panelists who will share what we've done since then. In a nutshell, we've been able to move forward with one of the PETA projects, the Program for Infrastructure Development of Africa projects in the Central Corridor, to really try to advance and accelerate progress on that. Secondly, we've completed a final, a third part of a Knowledge Series report related to helping provide more guidance in terms of knowledge and practical implementation. The report that's been released at Cape Town is a special report on project preparation. And finally, we're here to celebrate the transition of the World Economic Forum's role to the rightful leaders in Africa, including the NAPAD agency. So with that very brief introduction, I'm pleased to pass on to my left former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who's been serving as the chair of our global World Economic Forum and Goals Strategic Infrastructure Initiative and has been very much leading the process over the last three years. Africa, as I think people know here, has $100 billion a year infrastructure gap. In other words, we need to spend $1.5 trillion on infrastructure in the next 15 years. If we're to provide the electricity, only a third of Africans have electricity, provide the water and sanitation, provide the roads and rail that are necessary for economic growth, and provide the jobs necessary for 80 million young people in Africa to get jobs every year. And so if Africa could solve its infrastructure problem and secure the investment that's necessary, the growth rate of Africa could approach that of China and India. That is the prize that is available to Africa if we can deliver better infrastructure. So as Alec has said for the last two years, we've been working with African leaders on creating a bank of infrastructure projects that need to be done, working out how they could be done, working out what are the priorities in doing them, and bringing to fruition a number of projects, including what Alec has just mentioned, the Central Corridor Project, which links five countries around Tanzania, including Tanzania, and has been supported by all the political leaders of these countries who are meeting regularly to move the process forward. And now we're at the stage where projects within the Central Corridor, which is a road, rail and port project, are nearing fruition. So four have already become bankable. Others are on the point of becoming bankable, and many others are either public sector projects that will be done when the finance is available, or a public-private partnerships in the main which can deliver results. And the lessons that we're learning is that there is political will in Africa to move and solve the infrastructure gap, that there is coordination taking place amongst the leaders of Africa, particularly with the support this morning and over the last three years of President Zuma, who has got a personal interest in moving infrastructure development forward. There is an emphasis on delivery and getting things done, and this has been the success over only a few months of bringing the Tanzania project together. And now we are sending a message out to the rest of the world that Africa is ready with projects that can be financed by international investors if they are interested in seeing the benefits that can flow from investing in Africa. So we are at the start, I believe, of an investment decade that will solve the infrastructure gap, that will give hope to Africans that if they do not have electricity and 600 million don't have it now, that electricity can be extended. If they don't have water and sanitation, that this will be done, and at the same time that the roads and the rails that are necessary for internal trade as well as trade from inside Africa to the rest of the world are going to be built to deliver the infrastructure we need. Now, infrastructure itself may sound like a technical or sometimes a boring word, but it is the social and economic fabric that is essential to prove the quality of lives of the people of Africa, and the combination of investment in infrastructure and investment in education are going to make Africa one of the leading economies of the world in the future. Thank you. A key to the entire model we have been speaking about is bringing together a collection of business leaders together with government leaders and experts. And fundamental to what we've done is created what we call a business working group that consisted of over 40 organizations. I'm pleased to then invite Simh Shabalala, who's the Joint Chief Executive Officer of the Standard Bank Group. He has been one of the anchors of the business working group to invite him to share some comments. Just a couple of comments. I think it's very, very important for Africa to successfully address the infrastructure deficit for there to be as much coordination and cooperation and trust as is reasonably practicable between the official sector, government, DFIs, developers, financial institutions and organs of civil society. And so when one sees the Central Corridor Presidential Roundtable meeting on a quarterly basis, you're seeing the leadership required from the official sector and from governments who have the mandate, and that is a good signal, I think, to business and financiers. You're also seeing the Central Corridor Transit Facilitation Agency, which is the institutional capacity necessary to execute the projects. That is meeting on a regular basis and is executing. And as has been pointed out, you're seeing the business working group making a contribution to the discussions so as to make the projects that are being discussed dankable. There are many topics that one could cover, but as a financier, the one element I would just like to speak about is the importance of early-stage project financing and the facilities that are available to give effect to that. The Boston Consulting Group as well as the World Economic Forum have produced a paper that sets out some of the principles underpinning this. But for me, here are important principles. First of all, you need developers that have sufficient equity to be able to execute on the early stage of projects. So they need the equity and the capability to be able to do this. To the extent that you need money from government and the official sector, governments can either recover this money through tariffs and or through making bidders pay for this and let the bidders recover their funds through the transactions. But importantly, there is funding from DFIs, from governments, from the World Bank which needs to be mobilized for the purposes of these early stages of projects. The importance of what is happening here, though, is the ability of the central corridor and the institution set up to execute against that opportunity to mobilize and coordinate the raising of those funds. It's truly a historic moment and we are immensely excited to be part of it. Thank you. Thank you, Sim. I'm pleased not to also call on another member of our Business Working Group but also as a chair. So we had two chairs, the Development Bank of South Africa and General Electric who chaired the Business Working Group. And in this regard, it's very pleased that we have Patrick Dallami who's the CEO and Managing Director of the DBSA here and he's been actually a very key stalwart pillar of the work as well, including the work at the central corridor. Thank you, Alex. Really, it is a moment of excitement indeed because if we were to look at when we identified the central corridor as the most impactful and transformative project of all the 51 PDE projects, we then took nine months. This actually involved workshops after workshops where we were discussing information as the teams were collating this information from the various countries. But the best thing was the political leadership that we saw in the five central corridor countries where they set that coordinating agency to say then each country will then make sure that their agencies coordinate and contribute and forward the information to the coordinating agent, the CCTTFA, that then we were able to collate the data and package this data and then analyze and putting our money into preparing these projects so that they are ready for presentation to the presidential round table on the 25th of March this year where the president from the five central corridor countries were present and on the 26th, we then were able to present those projects, the 23 projects that were presented to the investor community. We had over 200 investors in Dar es Salaam and Jura Sanyali Convention Center. And I'm quite excited because in the manner that we presented those projects, we presented projects that were ready for investors. We presented projects that still required further project preparation and projects actually that we still then need to put together and drive further. But what then we are now doing is the NEPAD agency will now be able to work with the CCTTFA of the central corridor to then ensure that all these projects are all actually brought into pangability and are all then actually brought into execution. But the leadership that has been played by the World Economic Forum in really bringing together all the various parties, it was a classical public-private partnership situation that we saw delivering such a massive project in a very short space of time which then says, going forward to the other 50 PIDA projects, we then can be able to really replicate the same model and framework to drive those projects into pangability where in we can get the investors to participate. Thank you, Patrick. And a core government partner or intergovernmental partner that we've had throughout the whole process, of course, has been the NEPAD agency, the African Development Bank, the African Union Commission. And in this regard, as mentioned by Patrick, we're very pleased that with the kickoff that we've lent, we're now very pleased and honoured that we can hand over the mandate of the secretariat in terms of accelerating the other 50 projects to the NEPAD agency. The World Economic Forum will remain committed to supporting infrastructure development in Africa with some future work and including supporting Dr. Miyake. But may I please call on Dr. Ibrahim Miyake, who's the CEO of NEPAD agency, to make some comments. Thank you, Alex. I would like to say three quick things. The first one, Africa did put its house in order in what relates to infrastructure development by designing PIDA. But we didn't have a governance model in the implementation of regional infrastructure projects. And this is why that partnership with the World Economic Forum, which gathered the business working group with the DFI's private sector, did allow us to frame a governance model. So now we have a governance model for regional infrastructure implementation. And once we have this model, we can accelerate implementation, go to bankability and go beyond bankability to issues related to maintenance, operations, and so on. So the emergence of that governance model is a key achievement of the business working group. And as Prime Minister Brown was saying, we are at the verge of that investment decade and that governance model will play a critical role in that investment decade here. Thank you, Dr. Miyake. I think we'll take time for two or three questions maximum. If there are any, please go ahead. Halmo Price, The Bricks Post. In terms of timelines, actual people on the ground, when are you expecting the central corridor to put down its first rail, build its first bridge, et cetera? Great. Let me take you if there's another question or two and then we'll answer them all. Yes, sir. Thank you. It's Muzoni Lombage from SAPC. Some of the disturbances that we sometimes see on the continent, I think currently, it would be kind of like Burundi and some pockets of disturbances, how much do they impact on some of those projects that you intend doing? And is the political world sufficient for you to be able to say you're ready to get going? Very good. One more question? Please. A very good morning to the panelists. Very good morning, Prime Minister Brown. My name is Stuart Lisulo, a business reporter for The Post Newspapers based in Lusaka, Zambia. A very quick question. I come from a country where the government in the last two to three years has gone to the capital markets to finance infrastructure development. Both in 2012 and 2014, there was a successful issuance of sovereign Euro bond for $750 million and $1 billion in 2014. The question I wanted to ask, Prime Minister Brown, is is it sustainable to contract debt to finance infrastructure development on the massive scale which the Zambian government is planning to do? Great. So I think let's answer those three questions. Again, the first one was a little more detail on the timeline on central corridor. The second was how do we deal with political risks that will inevitably occur in any region of the world? And finally, a question specifically on the capital markets and the financing. Mr. Brown, Prime Minister Brown, perhaps you can take the first answer. Well, in a way, the central corridor is already starting. These are projects that are now underway. I said that four had already been financed. Other four on the point of being financed out of more than 20 projects that make up the whole of the central corridor. So there will be road, there will be rail, there will be port development. And I think we're already seeing the beginnings of what's happening. As far as the risks are concerned, this is what we have got to show the world. That the perception of risk or the risks that people perceive are far less than the actual risks. Of course, you've got to deal with currency risk, regulatory risk, you've got to deal with construction risk, you've got to deal with what's generally called political risk. But I think the continent is now ready to show that we can actually minimize these risks and make the projects that we're talking about acceptable to investors. Because when we're talking about 1.5 trillion of investment, that cannot all be generated from within Africa. It's going to be generated from support from the international community. And we will have investors from all over the world. The political will, I am absolutely sure, is being proven to exist. When you have five leaders meeting regularly to discuss one project, and when you have today President Zuma lending his weight to the whole infrastructure delivery project that we're engaged in, and when you have the African Union next week going to be discussing these very big questions of infrastructure, you can see that the political will exist, not just for the central corridor, but for the north-south corridor, for the Inga project, which is a major project to deliver hydroelectric power into not just the DRC, but into the whole of Africa. These are projects where it's clear to me that the leaders of Africa now know that the growth of Africa and employment in Africa and the quality of life in Africa depends on these things. As far as the capital markets are concerned, I mean, of course, in every country there's a level of debt which is sustainable and a level of debt beyond which people are not going to lend to you, but that depends on the individual circumstances of the country. It depends on what its general surpluses and deficits are. It depends on the growth of the economy. All these things have got to be taken into account. Dr. Mayaki, on the political risk, since you have the overall mandate on all of the 51 projects, what would you want to give any additional thoughts back to that question? Let me refer to the fact that I'm the interim CEO of the African Peer Review Mechanism, which looks at governance on the continent. What we found, what we find is that the governance indicators have been improved substantially and that political risk has been reduced in this continent. Whether you take the Moibraim Index on governance or you take the reports of the African Peer Review Mechanism, the strong trend is a strong improvement on governance issues. And then, governance issues are linked to political risk. More and more stability does exist. It is true that we have pockets of insecurity and pockets of disturbance. But these pockets are also being managed by the African Union in a very organized way, which was not the case 15 years ago. So I think we shouldn't put too much emphasis on that issue. It is an important issue. But significant progress is being made in the domain. Great. I think we are out of time. But unless Patrick or Sim, did you want to add anything really quickly to answer the questions? I think what is important on the capital market and the euro bond, the sustainability of these debt payments by the countries, it's quite important that especially the economic infrastructure, the economic infrastructure have the ability to generate their own revenues. And hence, they can be able actually to serve the debt associated with the funding of this infrastructure. It becomes quite important that then in the structuring of these deals, the hedging mechanism and the hedging strategies to try and manage the currency risk, especially if we're to raise bonds in Europe and in Europe. And we are coming actually to fund a project inside Zambia and the fluctuations actually of the exchange between the quarter and the hard currency has got to be well managed to make sure that the commercial viability of the project is well protected. But I think it's something that we are seeing more and more element of servity and innovation in the structuring of these deals. But just a quick one on the central corridor, because the central corridor talks about the linkages of those countries to the Dar es Salaam support via rail and road corridors linking the Eastern DRC, the Burundi, linking Rwanda, and that goes through also the what we call the late Tanganyiga, which is 700 kilometers long on average 1.5 kilometers deep. If really, really, really, and those inland ports, you can imagine the linkages and the efficiencies and the effectiveness that actually it would provide in terms of the economies of those countries to the rest of the world. It's mind boggling. Thank you. Thank you. I think we look forward to being here again in a year or two is time to continue to give you an update. If you wanted more information on either the early stage project financing report or the overall initiative, we have those available, maybe not in this room. But they're lying around. But please give me a card or one of my colleagues a card at the back and we can make sure you have a report. Thank you very much.