 Our work on the asset type program is extensive and aligned with the priorities of South Africa. This partnership, which includes a broad range of South African government institutions and university such as WITS, it founded on shared values and aspirations that serve as the cornerstone for our collaborative efforts. Our gathering here today for this dialogue presents an opportunity for us to sustain and build relations on various fronts. In that vein, I would like to thank the WITS Global Change Institute, as well as Professor Imran Valodia, the Pro Vice-Chancellor of WITS, for hosting us today in this beautiful venue for that. So I'd like to express the appreciation to his deputy minister of finance Dr. David Mazunda, her Excellency Sander Kramer, the Ambassador to South Africa, as well as the representatives of the FCDO UK High Commission in South Africa. We're grateful for your presence and for your unwavering support. And all the special income extends to partners and colleagues from the National Treasury as well as from the South Africa Revenue Service. We can all attest to the fact that our combined endeavors play a key role in advancing the mission of SA tight, which is supporting South Africa in evidence based policymaking. Together, we have observed a substantial contribution of the program over recent years. The research undertaken under SA tight has contributed to the policy environment, highlighting the importance of evidence based policymaking. It is through this kind of collaboration that we as a UNIWIDER, we can leverage expertise, resources and networks to address a multiplicity of complex challenges, like climate change and infrastructure development, which is the focus of today's debate. Our collective imagination, voices and action and partnerships can help raise attention to these important issues. As SA tight, our aim includes addressing climate change through the research conducted under Workstream Vive in the context of the interconnectedness of water, food and energy around climate change. In this regard, we anticipate the additional outputs from this work stream over the coming years and we look very much forward to the translation of that research into actionable policies. In closing, I would like to thank our panelists here on stage for participating in today's dialogue and we look forward to the contribution of your rich expertise and experiences to the discussion. To our guests, both here present in the room as well as online, we are very pleased to have you all here and we hope that this dialogue will provide a platform for sharing and enhancing our joint knowledge on these important issues. As we strive towards building a greener, more inclusive and sustainable world to all. Thank you. At this stage, I have the pleasure to welcome Professor Imran Valodia, the Pro Vice-Chancellor of WITS, to provide some welcoming remarks. Thank you. This is Excellency Minister Sotndog, her Excellency, Ms. Kramer, the head of UNU, and all of the guests here on behalf of WITS University, we are extremely pleased to have you here and extremely pleased to host this event today. I just want to make two kind of remarks. The first is to make the suggestion that I think it's appropriate that you're having this dialogue in this building. One of the things that our university is kind of renowned for, probably our most important kind of research is work that's been done for quite some time now on the origins of human beings. And this kind of centre kind of really celebrates the work that our university has done to kind of provide evidence that the origins of human beings is right here. And if you had more time, we would be happy to show you some of the work that's been done in that respect. But I think it's a time when kind of as a species, we need to be thinking not only about where we come from, but whether things are going to go on, whether they kind of going to end, or whether there's a pathway in which we can ensure that human beings continue to survive on this planet and continue to survive on this planet on a sustainable basis. So I think the kinds of sort of conversations that you're going to have today are kind of appropriately done in a place like this and we especially pleased to host you here. The second comment I wanted to make was just to share with you some of the thinking at which university about the kind of setting up of the office that I run. So I have the exceptionally grand title of Pro Vice Chancellor for Climate Sustainability and Inequality. And I think as that title might suggest, what we're trying to do at VITS is to promote expertise in centres such as the Global Change Institute who are kind of really hosting you today, but also to think about and build how it might be possible for us to extend our expertise in the science of climate change into areas of economic and kind of social dimensions of climate change. I think you'd all agree with me that while there are some kind of extremely important issues that we still need to do on the specifically science kind of elements of it, and one example of that is the fantastic work that Professor Francois Engelberg and his colleagues do in the Global Change Institute. We also need to be thinking a lot more creatively about the economic questions and I think that partly is the type of work that you're doing at SA Tide, but also some of the social questions because unless we can integrate all of those, I think the pathway to a sustainable future is going to be a really, really hard one. So on behalf of its university, once more we throw to have you here and I look forward to the conversation. Thank you very much. Now I have the pleasure to move to the opening remarks from His Excellency David Mazzondo, Deputy Minister of Finance, as well as her Excellency Sandra Krammer, the Ambassador of the EU. After the opening remarks, we will do the signing of the agreement on the right-hand side of the table into one section. Deputy Minister, the floor is yours. You guys are very serious. The room is so tense and it shows how serious you are about these issues we have to deal with. Distinguished guests, key stakeholders, ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to welcome you all to this important policy dialogue on infrastructure investment within the context of climate change and allow me to extend my special welcome to the EU Ambassador Sandra Krammer. It's great to meet you. We meet more often these days. It means that we are doing something right. And to the UN University-Wider Director, Colonel Sen, Prof Imran Balderi, a lot of things are happening at VERS. I thought you had a dean there, but you are now your Pro Vice Chancellor for the climate. It means I have not been in touch with my alma mater, so I need to do something about it. I would also like to acknowledge the esteemed panelist joining us today for this discussion. We are here to deliberate on the critical role of infrastructure in economic growth and combating climate change. And we do so with the support of many international partners, notably the EU, and it will be something very soon, to signify and solidify the support that we get. But also our partner, the SA Tide, has been very supportive and useful in the work that we do as national treasury. And my understanding is that the purpose of this dialogue isn't just about discussing infrastructure, but it's about finding the most effective ways to build better, stronger, and a more sustainable South Africa. And I'm glad that the UN University and the EU work very closely with the different sovereigns on the continent, because the climate change has no boundaries. If one of our South Africa's water resource, Lesotho is impacted negatively by climate change, South Africa will also suffer. I grew up in a banter stand called Forma Gazankulu. The boundaries were very rigid there, and that's why we could not deal with the banter stand. I was right at the border of this Forma vendor and Forma Gazankulu. So when the Gazankulu government fumigates the area, the mosquitoes, they will just cross over to the other. And in that part of my country, malaria was forever a problem. Why? Because there were so rigid political boundaries, which there was no collaboration, there was no common work in combating malaria. So similarly, you can't deal with climate change just through sovereign jurisdictions. Climate change knows no boundaries, and it's for this reason that we've got to have a global approach, an African approach in dealing with the issue of climate change. Infrastructure development is the cornerstone of any thriving economy. South Africa is not infrastructure full of productivity. Of us, we arrive late for our meetings at work because of the poor public infrastructure. Infrastructure also enhances the quality of life for our citizens. All of us, we want clean air, clean water, which we understand Jobeck is experiencing some challenges. So, as far as water is concerned, direct your anger at the metro, Johannesburg metro, not at me, because everything is reduced to national government. And infrastructure lays the foundation for the long-term economic growth, and our government recognizes this. We've made significant investments in critical infrastructure. These investments are not just about roads and bridges. They are about creating jobs. They are about reducing poverty. These investments are about making South Africa a competitive player in the global economy. In South Africa, we feel the negative impact of climate change in imported sectors such as infrastructure, water and energy, the frequency of natural disasters, and the results thereof are felt daily in South Africa. Therefore, investments in renewable energy sources, water conversation systems, and sustainable urban development are key to mitigating and adapting to climate change. The fiscal cannot afford to financially support the amount of investment that will require for climate resilient infrastructure. Africa as a continent needs an annual investment of 190 billion US dollars for its clean energy transition. 57 percent of African countries are in debt, and they are spending so much money on debt service costs, thus disabling them to undertake investments in climate change or in climate resilient infrastructure. As a South African government, we've undertaken different measures, innovative ways to seek to finance this infrastructure that we need because we do need to discuss other innovative financing mechanisms for this infrastructure such as green bonds, carbon credits to fund these climate resilient infrastructure projects. Like I said, South Africa, we are undertaking innovative measures to finance the climate resilient infrastructure. The infrastructure fund is a testament to our commitment to stimulating infrastructure investment and blending public and private financing to build a better and a more sustainable future. The infrastructure fund stands out as a pivotal move designed to stimulate investment across various critical sectors of our economy. This approach seeks to mobilize public and private resources to mitigate risks for private investors and to foster an environment where collaborative financing models thrive. Yes, challenges such as securing funding are huge. However, ensuring sustainability and integrating the latest technologies are other additional challenges. For us, these challenges should be treated as opportunities for innovation, for forging robust private public partnership. This should also be treated as an opportunity for leveraging the power of technology in our infrastructure development goals. At the heart of effective infrastructure planning lies data driven decision making. This is where the SA tight program has continued to play a very critical role. Research informs our policy decision making processes even though you may not like some of the decisions we take, but we do try to pay attention to evidence in order for us to take a certain decision. This collaboration of world-class researchers, policymakers, the national treasury, university, the United Nations, university-wide and value donors like the EU, UK, FCDO is building bridges between researchers as well as policymakers. This helps us to ensure that our strategies are built on sound evidence and an understanding of how the real world works, not how our minds work. At this juncture, I really wish to express our heartfelt gratitude to the European Union for their commitment to support of the work that we do, including SA tight program. Partnerships like this strengthen our approach to sound policy making. The insights from SA tight research give us a powerful tool to navigate complex infrastructure decisions. I wish you very fruitful deliberations during this policy dialogue. Thank you. Honourable Deputy Minister, Honourable Dean, of course Director of UNU Wider, representatives of the government of the Republic of South Africa, members of the diplomatic corps, academia, civil society, and of course colleagues joining us online. You have a beautiful room here, but we know there's also many, many people online. Ladies and gentlemen, all protocol observed. I am the European Union Ambassador to South Africa based in Pretoria. I have not been here before. I just learned the Deputy Minister is at home here, the Alma Mater. He studied here, but I am here and I start with the Origin Centre and it couldn't be better. I think it's just amazing that you have chosen to have this event here, Dean. It's very beautiful. I'm also honoured to be part of this important event. First of all, a point which is a bit obvious, but I'll make it nevertheless. We live in a world that is defined by global challenges such as climate change or digitalisation, inequalities, demographies, and the erosion of democracy. And how we will respond to these trends will shape our lives and those of generations to come. So these global challenges require comprehensive and long-term solutions. Solutions that, in turn, require collaboration across disciplines and between countries. And we will only overcome these common challenges if we rely on science and data to inform our decisions. Decisions that are evidence-based and grounded on expert work. And in that spirit, the European Union is delighted to continue to support SA Tide towards inclusive economic development with further 2 million euros. And this collaboration speaks of our shared and our strong commitment to advancing evidence-based policymaking. And it tells the story of another successful partnership between South Africa and the European Union. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the minister, the deputy minister, but also national treasury and other South Africa stakeholders for the excellent collaboration on this programme. Let me just take a few minutes to share with you why I feel this policy dialogue is important and some suggestions on how we can take it forward. And we need to just say amongst ourselves that this is the most patient panel that I have ever seen. But let me just take you through this. The why, the what and the how. So the why is that we're not free from any criticism, that it is very difficult to see the impact of public investments on the ground. And I think for many years we've been trying to do too many things in too many places and in small doses. And our global gateway investment strategy is breaking away from this and is achieving greater focus, greater scale and greater impact. Focus by targeting infrastructure investments in a limited number of sectors, namely energy, digital, transport, health, education and research. Greater scale by using public financing as a catalyst to leverage capital from private sector and others such as development banks. And greater impact by investing in projects that are transformational because they can change the lives and the economies of whole communities. Just a few examples. That's the what. We've started to roll out global gateway with a very successful initiative on pharmaceuticals. I've just exchanged with the Dean on that and of course that is about producing vaccines for pandemics, be they global COVID-19 or other pandemics in Africa for Africa. And we are very close in successfully producing mRNA based vaccines in South Africa, for Africa. But secondly, there's more work on going and other strategic value chains. And recently we have joined a collaboration with the government on value change such as green hydrogen and critical raw materials. And on both we rely on long standing cooperation that we've established with the government and important research conducted in these value chains. So the objective is to support the government of South Africa's industrialization, the infrastructure development plans and the greater integration of South Africa's and European global value chains. So the how? To develop sustainable value change, it will require the mobilization of a wide range of tools, instruments and actors. And there's no one actor alone that can move the needle in these value chains. So global gateway operates at three levels. It mobilizes a combination of tools in the form of technical assistance, grants, budget support, concessional loans and de-risking instruments such as guarantees. It leverages the resources and the expertise of European development finance institutions and agencies. And by mustering all that together, we're talking about team Europe. And we achieve scale and greater impact. And it relies on the power of the private sector and its capital and technology. So we're mobilizing all these tools already for infrastructure finance in the climate context in South Africa. Just for examples, if I may. One, we mobilized resources through strategic partnerships and blended finance. For example, we concluded two agreements to develop a green hydrogen value chain. One with the French development agency through which a grant of 7 million from the European Union leveraged 200 million in very concessional loans. And the other with the European Investment Bank, where a grant of 21 million euros from the European Union leveraged a concessional loan of 350 million euros. Secondly, we're strengthening frameworks for infrastructure delivery. Our new infrastructure technical assistance facility, which has just started its activity at National Treasury, helps with capacity building innovative finance frameworks. And that is to boost innovation and job creation. Thirdly, we're deepening our collaboration on sustainable finance. Sustainability related instruments are critical to attract large scale private investment in green projects. And this has the capacity to attract trillions of funds, which are currently in the portfolios of institutional investors or pension funds or capital markets that can fill investments and infrastructure gaps. We have just, and the Deputy Minister spoke about green bonds, we have just adopted a global green bond initiative. And through that, we allocated 1 billion euro to de-risk private investments in emerging markets as well as to provide technical advisory services to improve national frameworks. And fourth, we're contributing to improve service delivery at some municipalities. The EU and South Africa will continue to work in this area. So, ladies and gentlemen, all these tools under the Global Gateway Investment Strategy offer a very powerful toolbox and it attracts as so much needed finance that can fill these investments and the climate-proof infrastructure gaps. So, this conference is a very opportune moment to reflect on this and your reflections are very much needed. And again, our long-standing partnership with South Africa under SA Tide has laid a solid platform and it's opened new and innovative forms of collaboration. So, the European Union is very excited about this opportunity and we're excited to now sign another 2 million for this very, very interesting and very necessary project. So, I look forward to come back very, very often to the Origin Center, first of all, and to WITS and to look forward to excellent collaboration continued with you and Wider, of course with National Treasury and with all of you. I wish the very patient panel a lovely debate. I wish all of you a really, really good afternoon and thank you very much. Please have very fruitful discussions. Thank you. So, we're going to do the signing very briefly before we go to substantive matter of today's debate. Thank you very much. As we have now the money in the pocket. Go for drinks. No. Let me introduce you to Georgina Ryan. Apologies for the panel, but I think she's going to do a very nice framing. So, Georgina is the policy lead of Workstream 5 of Asset Hyde, which is on Waterhood and Energy in the context of climate change and I think she's going to tell us a bit what the Workstream has been up to and then we go straight into the debate. Thank you. Afternoon everyone and to the patient panel. I hope you are comfortable. Good afternoon to the Deputy Minister of Finance, the Ambassador to the EU, to our FCDO colleagues, the UNewider colleagues, and all of our, all protocols observed. Today we are convening here today to address the pressing issue of investments in infrastructure in the context of climate change and my aim is to provide you a bit more information about what we do in Asset Hyde. We've got six work streams cutting across the macro economy, how firms operate, the tax work that we do especially through the data lab and more recently the climate change work. But Asset Hyde didn't start recently, we've been doing Asset Hyde since 2017 and there was a first phase of Asset Hyde, so I think it's worth mentioning the work that came before that. I lead the Workstream on Water, Food and Energy in the context of climate change along with my academic lead, Professor Mark Swilling. And in Workstream 5 we've embarked on an interdisciplinary approach to research questions that are critical in terms of climate change. In phase one of the Asset Hyde program, there was a focus on understanding climate change and the energy sector. There was a particular outcome around a model that was developed through Asset Hyde called the SATEM GE model which is a CGE linked model for the South African economy. We've used that model to determine that we really do need to decarbonise our economy and scaling renewables is the way to do that. So that was one of the outcomes of Asset Hyde phase one. But what we've done in Asset Hyde phase two is to broaden the scope of the sectors. So obviously we speak to water, energy and food and the water energy food nexus is important for us. Not only to understand those sectors but how these sectors interlink. So we also want to build relevant tools and analytical capabilities through the capacity building arm of this particular research program. And we've partnered with various academic institutions and researchers to develop the Workstream 5 program. Now some of the things that we're doing in Workstream 5 is to develop a hybrid economy model for climate change. We're doing this with the French Development Bank through the multi-sectoral macrodynamic ecological shift model, the GEMS model. And we're working with Antoine Godin to develop a hybrid model for the climate's economy. We're doing that alongside the Development Bank of Southern Africa. And we are partnering with Stellenbosch's Centre for Sustainability Transitions in that particular work. A very exciting project to develop a model that's going to be relevant for our economy and also track financial flows in terms of climate change. So while there's a lot of work to develop a model, we need to understand the sectors that we're working in. So deep understanding of the energy sector, the water sector and the food sector will be brought together into this model. What we've done in partnership with the Development Bank of Southern Africa, the Presidential Climate Commission, the National Planning Commission and SA Tide is to do deep dives into the water sector and the energy sector to understand the requirements of the investment in the water sector structure until 2050. So long-term investments that are required for these sectors. Today we have on the panel one of the researchers that did the water sector work. That particular work was commissioned to Palmer Development Group with Kim Walsh and James Cullis from Zittari. And we are very thankful to Amanda Ganja from the WRI who was the chair of that particular research project. Pivotal insights from this research emphasize not only the sheer scale of investments that are needed, but the critical timing of these investments. So the urgency to act cannot be understated. Delaying, achieving our sustainable development goals and the NDP objectives not only compound the challenges, but escalate the costs associated with inaction. So the findings suggest that timely investments especially in the next decade are crucial for setting the foundation to allow us to adapt to climate change. The strategic timing of these investments transcend the immediate need for the capital and speak to the heart of infrastructure resilience. By focusing on early implementation of water conservation and demand management, clearing alien invasives and the pursuit of efficiencies in the water sector, we can set ourselves up for a more sustainable and efficient water system. I can say that the water report is available on the SA Tide website and I encourage this audience to read that report and engage with the contents and the policy recommendations. We are also working similarly through our partnership with the researchers at PWC and Osmotic Engineering on the same research for the energy sector to 2050. Achieving energy security and meeting our climate commitments and ensuring a just transition. In our findings so far, and the report is being developed, we understand that targeting infrastructure investments and designing our energy system for a sustainable future means that we not only scale renewable energy, but we look at the whole energy system in the redesign of our current energy future. Through this project we're not just planning for an energy system, but we are looking at making it equitable, sustainable and prosperous for all South Africans. So interval to our work, not just the modeling work and the sectoral work, we make sure that we work on a science-based foundation. And here we are today at the WITS University and the Global Change Institute team, led by Francher Engelbrecht, has been doing a project with SA Tide on the long-term planning and scenarios that we need to take into account for climate change in southern Africa. So the research by the Global Change Institute is done in terms of very high greenhouse gas emissions, so we're looking at a very steep emissions trajectory and we want to make sure that global warming is kept to 1.5 degrees in the near-term and particularly under the highest emission scenarios we look at what that's going to mean for our region. So this projection signifies a future where southern Africa becomes increasingly drier and warmer. I do think we experience that. Experiencing more frequent heat waves and high fire dangers alongside decreases in annual rainfall, especially in the primary rainfall regions. So detailing the scenarios that need to underpin the research that we do in SA Tide forms the basis for some of the modeling work that we will be doing as well. We integrate all of these approaches, the economics, the science, SA Tide. We work collectively across disciplines to produce the policy recommendations around this research. So today we're going to be discussing how to leverage these types of insights from SA Tide along with our partners to inform strategies for infrastructure development. This rich body of work not only illuminates the path towards sustainable, resilient infrastructure but also emphasizes the importance of a just transition and towards a climate resilient future. I extend my gratitude to everyone contributing to this body of work, the research assistants that are here, Richard Kimmer who's been working with us on the model, the Stellenbosch students and thank you very much to the panel today who will be engaging in the topic of the day. Let me hand over to our moderator, Nishendra to introduce the panel. Thank you. Thank you Jorina. Good afternoon firstly to Deputy Minister Masondo, Ambassador Cramer and Professor Imran Valodia as well as all the esteemed guests here today both in person and online. I'm Nishendra Mutli and I'm from the Economic Development Partnership, a collaborative intermediary organization that convenes diverse stakeholders to work on difficult development problems towards collective impact. I will be moderating this exciting panel on financing climate resilient infrastructure in South Africa. Given South Africa's development challenges which Deputy Minister Masondo highlighted very significantly, infrastructure is critical for enabling and stimulating inclusive economic growth. For our economy to grow, basic infrastructure and services need to be in place and working well. But we have to also contend with climate change as we face an increased frequency of extreme weather events affecting infrastructure and people. 2023 saw storm surges and floods in early February we saw seven electricity pylons falling over depriving 50,000 households both in the central Karoo and Karoo districts from electricity to food and for clinics to be able to provide medicine and so on and had significant weather conditions during events highlighted the vulnerability of these particular regions, particularly to natural disasters and the importance of disaster management and efforts. On the radar of some of our regions right now are not just as Georgina just mentioned out, not just floods and storm surges but droughts, fires and heatwaves. So infrastructure needs to be not only resilient to climate events but it must aid our regions to become much more resilient to the effects of climate change itself. So we're not just talking about the climate resilience of infrastructure but we're talking about the broader social economic resilience towards climate change infrastructure and all of this needs to take place in a context where the FISCUS alone cannot support this transition. A lot more is needed and the FISCUS is only able to do so much in being able the big question that we hear in the era of climate change how can South Africans and South Africa imagine its infrastructure development to not only withstand the challenges that lie ahead but at the same time to foster an inclusive sustainable growth model. We want to delve into the policy implications into the strategies, into the investment strategies and quite importantly the capabilities necessary that are needed for this kind of transition. To realize this kind of transition we need a pipeline of climate resilient infrastructure projects. For example Cape Town that 40% of its planned infrastructure pipeline over the next 10 years will contribute towards climate resilience. These 1,436 resilience projects amount to approximately 55.5 billion. Such pipelines need to be able to supported by strategies that require innovation collaboration and sustainable finance. The strategies we are able to explore here in this discussion include improving our infrastructure planning and delivery systems. How do we improve long term planning, project preparation, appraisal, execution of projects, operation and maintenance and MNE of our infrastructure pipelines? How do we streamline and optimize the institutional arrangements needed for these systems? How can we harness the power of new technologies and innovations? As Deputy Minister Masondo and Ambassador was referring to around data, digital innovation become quite critical. What kind of capabilities we need for strategic partnerships and for blended finance? And what kinds of capabilities do we need for a bankable pipeline of resilient projects? So we are going to rely very much on our panel here today to help us navigate through these issues. And SA Tide has put an extensive array of experts to assist us with this. So welcome to all the panelists who are now introduced. Bochumelo Mascio is the head of infrastructure advisory services in the Government Technical Advisory Center. He is responsible for overseeing the review and assessment of large and complex public infrastructure investment proposals and feasibility studies. And he also advises on reforms and initiatives that aim to improve infrastructure outcomes. And Jennifer Goligo, who is next to me, is the Africa Chief Economist for Ernst & Young and is an experienced leader in economic analysis and public policy. She also spent nine years at the Economic Policy Division at the National Treasury. Avril Halstead is the head financial sector policy strategy at first-rand. For ten years, she was also Chief Director at National Treasury, exercising oversight of over 40 of the largest state-owner enterprises, which I assume was a very interesting job. And we look forward to reading the book some more. James Cullis is a water resource engineer with nearly 20 years of experience working on water resource and climate change. He is a technical director and the expertise leader for sustainability at Zutari. And finally we have Machediso Lenguasa, who is a finance policy specialist and a researcher at Section 27. She currently serves on the steering committees of Budget Justice Coalition, Imali Yetu and forms part of the fiscal openness accelerator advisory group for the National Treasury. So thank you, panelists. I want to launch into our first question and to ask you and to start with you and Jerika, how do we ensure that the climate-resilient investors are able to be able to meet our country's immediate economic needs and our long-term sustainability goals? Thank you very much. So I think really there's various facets one needs to focus on when looking at this aspect. Firstly, it's around basically doing climate-risk assessments of infrastructure. So that's very much what SA Tide is currently doing, looking at particular sectors. And that's really key to kind of see where the different vulnerabilities lie. And also forward-looking perspective. And then it's around integrated planning. And I think that just comes up as a theme again and again and again. It's beyond moving beyond whether it's a glass bowl or our line of our borders. It's beyond different fields and faculties. It's really around bringing all expertise along. And kind of bringing this broader perspective to planning infrastructure. And the length of that is also looking at innovation across sectors. So whether it's in terms of infrastructure innovation but also re-looking infrastructure across the world is built based on outdated assumptions to where we're sitting now. So it's around verifying those assumptions, doing those assessments and kind of conducting reviews there. And I think there's of course a big capacity building and development education aspect that's really needed. And I think also which is coming more and more to the fore is around properly evaluating and quantifying the impact. Because now we're moving into everyone is figuring out how to report on ESGs and sustainability and so on. But now we're moving where there's a field where people are very wary of greenwashing. So it's around quantifying initially when you embark on infrastructure investment, understanding what are the impacts and outcomes you want to achieve understanding what metrics you need to measure. And then following that throughout the life of that project to really kind of bring forward those impacts. Also it helps throughout the project life cycle, investment life cycle and tweak and understand where you can make better impacts. Great, thanks very much Achille. So some really important points coming out there about data and particularly about verifying assumptions and about linking this through to impacts and outcomes and monitoring those impacts and outcomes in the life cycle of a planned project. But Chameleon, your thoughts on what do we need to ensure climate development and infrastructure investments deliver the growth? Yeah, thanks Nisha. I mean one of the ideological, I suppose, development that is over the recent past, that in the past we used to think about meeting economic needs, especially the media wants, as a trade off to achieving climate resilience. I think at this point in time we see these things as reinforcing mutually. So the proposition that I want to follow the first one is that we have to mainstream climate finance in our infrastructure approach. So again in the past you used to plan your project and once you've done that you say, oh by the way there's environmental issues that I have to think about and climate resilience issues and then you do it as an add-on. I think that world is now behind us and from a treasury perspective that's one of the areas that we are looking into to say what's the best way of mainstreaming climate finance because we do recognize that infrastructure is a long-term business. So you have to be thinking about what happens 30 years from now and include as much as possible some of those elements into infrastructure as you build it. The second one I think is around the issue of developing a credible pipeline. I don't always use the word bankable because a lot of, well some of the infrastructure that we do is about providing public services so bankable is not a word that you would use in those cases. Now in developing this credible pipeline you are looking at value for money which is an important concept. You are looking at development and sustainability impact and you say to yourself how do I optimize that? Of course there are other elements that you could be looking into. One of the lessons that I learned quite early on in my career was that this principle of infrastructure has very little inherent value meaning that the value of a power station is not how much it costs but it's in the services that it enables and I think that's where we have to start thinking about the services that we are going to be providing. We have to think about development impacts because unfortunately we do have some social ills. We do have growth issues and so on and so forth. Similarly issues of sustainability are an important consideration that you cannot afford to say I will raise these 20 years from now. You have to be thinking about them now already. And then the third one for me is about partnerships between government and the private sector. Again I think that the fiscals had all the money that we needed in that way we could say to the private sector we don't need you but unfortunately we don't have that. To be honest with you I don't even think even if we had the money that it would be desirable to be using the fiscal resources in that kind of way. So this is a collaboration between government the private sector and all others they called us within the economy just so that again when we are talking about dealing with climate issues it's not left to one agent of the economy and I think for government it's about leading the way. It's about creating instruments. It's about creating mechanisms that can really ensure that we've got others behind us as we work through this path. Thank you very much Porto Mello and thanks for those three points in particular in finishing off on the one around partnerships which is going to be something we want to spend a little bit more time on in the discussion that follows. Evel your thoughts? Yeah so from our perspective so I'm sitting at first hand we are looking at this sort of space from two main perspectives. Firstly banks are going to come under increasing pressure for the emissions that they visit financing and so there's a need to start lending away from oil and gas into more sustainable investments and then secondly from a risk perspective so there are for instance areas where you cannot get a reinsurance that can undermine like if you have financed a house and that house is not insurable then if something happens to that house the security of a loan is completely wiped out. So we've and we're thinking of this also from a perspective of how we maybe need to play differently in this area and we've seen a number of key sectors coming out so it's obviously energy and water which is the topic of today but other ones like transport, manufacturing, mining and beneficiation of our minerals, agriculture and SMMEs. I'm going to zone in on water and energy today. I think in many of these areas obviously a bank can't play in all those areas. There's some areas where as what Tamela was saying it's really a public finance responsibility. There's not a commercial bankable business case there but we are so we're looking for those bankable opportunities and then we also are seeing that there are a number of areas like renewable energy generation where there's already significant movement happening. You're seeing the private sector come in, you've got the renewable energy program you've got private power initiatives, you've got people rolling out electricity on their rooftops etc. So for me one of the key areas where it seems that they are blockages is really on municipal infrastructure and obviously when you think about municipal infrastructure that covers the whole country. Any part of our country is covered by our municipality and when we're looking at the municipalities, I was just looking at the top 12 that are responsible for supplying 80% of the electricity, non ESCOM supplied electricity and 8 out of those 12 are financially distressed according to national treasury's rankings. So they are municipal entities that as a bank we probably not going to be able to lend directly to them and so we need to think about new kind of financing models. Being a bank we're obviously looking for where is the revenue stream that you could pay off the infrastructure. Under this essay wider Georgina spoke about the study that's been done earlier. They've looked at water, I think the numbers 254 billion was in the base case of the amount of funding that needs to go into the water sector each year. That covers operating costs as well as capital investment and when they've been looked at the sources there's a big gap and you look again we've had a look at the municipal level and you see that same gap coming through that in aggregate when you look at the municipalities they're not even able to cover the operating costs even if they were fully allocating the equitable share to electricity and water which they aren't. And so for me the area to uncover is if you look at things like water losses, electricity losses, whether the tariffs that are being charged are correct, whether the revenue collection, the billing and revenue collection is happening those are some of the areas where we're going to have to work quite hard and I think that requires that partnership between the public and private sector. Thanks very much for highlighting the need for partnership and also about the capability constraints particularly in the municipal environment and what that means for lending and for the potential for partnerships. On the ground on actual projects itself and working in the water resources space which is a really good example of where one might be wanting to make sure that investments are appropriate and are going to be able to meet our sustainability goals. Your thoughts on what's needed? Yeah thanks Shindra. I think so firstly important thing is to distinguish between the concept of resilient infrastructure or resilience through infrastructure and the resilience of the infrastructure. So they serve two very important roles and one is the infrastructure we need to become resilient and water is obviously a key case. The other thing is how do we protect that infrastructure from increasing climate risk so it continues to provide its function and so that's not only infrastructure that people places a lot of society and in case it is a great example and others of that case. On the resilient infrastructure component the one thing to think of is that in many ways we already know what we need to do. We have many of the technologies, we have many of the plans out there, we have many of the infrastructure and a lot of it is what's needed as the implementation and the maintenance and continued to function in that space particularly around our infrastructure. And if you go back 130 years ago people would have been having this exact same conversation sitting in a probably very similar location like this saying well here one goal that we discovered probably the fastest economy growing in the world at the time. How are we going to provide water security for this kind of place and we have a highly variable climate already. We are in probably the worst location from a water, we're sitting on a continental divide. It's the last place you want to develop an economy so we have to be creative, we have to look around, we look to the nearest source, the valve system. We have to provide a constipated system, the valve garage that transfers water into Ha Ting which we still use today. Over time that it's expanded we've had to go further and further field through innovation that we have to look beyond our borders to be innovative and say listen we live in a variable climate, let's look elsewhere and go to Lesotho as the benefits there and how do we enhance that and build that over time. So we very much need to continue to support that and enhance and grow out that and we learn from that, we need to implement it, learn from the Cape Town crisis for example there's a lot of great lessons there to learn. In many cases it's not because we don't know what we needed to implement, we've had plans to do alternative innovation, technology, diesel, reuse, groundwater, all of those plans have been there. It's a matter of implementing, speeding up the fast tracking and building the relations to fill that and finding the finance to do that. Actually on the financing question you mentioned the work that we've done now in the SA Tide work. So some precursor work to that looked at particularly the climate risks to that and it showed that this integrated system provides quite a lot of resilience to climate impacts because we can move water around the country and we can manage it. Provided we can pump it from there to here and that's where the municipal challenge comes in. We see increasingly that risk around and it's an energy challenge as well because we need that energy to treat and pump it so it becomes an integrated system and how do we address those, even if there's water in the dams how do we get it here. But we see the gap and you're right it's about 250 billion round a year that we need to first close the gap on the SDGs to make sure that we meet the SDG standards by 2030 then continue to provide water security and resilience up to 2050. A big part of that and probably the largest part of that is actually renewal. So having to replace infrastructure that's already been put in place we've made great strides in the last 30 years in actually providing basic services to a vast majority of the population that didn't have it maybe 30 years ago. But in many of that infrastructure systems we need to replace and we haven't done that necessary in many cases and we're coming to that case we need to do that. So we need to close that gap and then we look for the innovative so it's about a 90 billion gap that still remains and there are various policy factors we can try to find that but we still got to come short and we have to make some hard decisions in that space. Thanks very much James and I kind of appreciate the resonance with the point around municipal capability as well. It's quite important and also you're calling for stronger focus on innovation and strengthening implementation. Machetezo you're coming to us from a very important advocacy organization section 27 and you often effectively advocate for the adoption system. So thank you very much for that. So James and I were actually having a conversation off the record before this and we were reflecting about how this venue is actually ideal for the kind of conversation that we're having and it's really about learning from the past like learning what has worked, what can we bring forward and what can we do better and you know one of the big topics around climate change and climate financing is around the just energy transition and while there's some anxiety about how we're going to implement that how do we formulate that and what are the implications of that we I think sometimes that conversation happens without considering that we've had a transition in South Africa before just 30 years ago we had a democratic transition and while there was many hard won victories and some of those things and I can never discredit that because I'm a beneficiary of many of those interventions there are still some issues that are entrenched namely our triple challenge of poverty, inequality and unemployment. So when we you know it's been 30 years since and we've had a transition however some of those legacies are still entrenched in our society. So when we think about the future and think about the society that we want to build and you know that has inclusive economic development and how infrastructure can work towards that we need to be thinking how we can't be thinking the same way and entrenching the same issues that we've had. We need to be more creative even with the financing and so one of the most powerful ways to do so is to foreground the human rights and foreground the lived experience of people beneficiaries, intended beneficiaries instead of making a trade off in some way of is it the economy that we're developing or society are we giving away those things we need to be thinking about it inclusively that we need both we need that socioeconomic development and if we don't do that we risk just moving forward as a country but it's a best case scenario we survive climate change but we do so and we have the great infrastructure but much of the countries left behind and is not able to tap into it and not able to benefit from that adaptation and those mitigation if it's by the infrastructure so really we need to entrench and foreground human rights and foreground the intended beneficiaries if we are to create infrastructure that actually advances our cause in overcoming the detrimental impacts of climate change. Thank you very much. So some really important points there about particularly the triple challenge of poverty inequality and unemployment and effectively any infrastructure program around climate resilience needs to help us to address those things if it's going to be effective in producing inclusive economic growth. I think that point certainly stands out together with the other points that have been made in this round around data and the importance of doing risk assessments and looking at impacts and outcomes the immediate the three things that Bochumelo mentioned mainstreaming climate infrastructure having a credible pipeline of projects and then securing partnerships which has been echoed very much by everyone around the partnerships and particularly some of the challenges that are particularly in working in the municipal sector and James as well highlighting the similar thing and about the challenges of implementation and the need for innovation. In a nutshell we've covered a range of thoughts here but I'm wondering if you could come in on what are the most effective financing strategies to support sustainable infrastructure development particularly given the fact that we've got to do this in an environment that needs to ensure fiscal sustainability. That was made earlier about learning from the past and I think that what we need to do going forward a lot has to do with doing, you know what to do but doing it better I don't think it necessarily involves a lot of coming up with new things so for example I've already spoken about how we've seen the deterioration and the financial sustainability of the municipalities, you've already commented on the state owned enterprises they have historically been responsible for half of the public sector infrastructure investment and we again seeing ESCOMM trans-need both of them which are the two biggest ones reliant on government guarantees and so what we are seeing is that there's going to have to be a lot more reliance, a shift from balance sheet funding where private sector lenders lend to the company and take risk on the whole finances of the company but rather where it's much more project specific financing or assets based financing. I think that one of the areas where we need to do a lot of work as a country is that we haven't been that good, we talk a lot about blended financing but we haven't been actually that good at blended financing what you typically see is infrastructure investments that are either completely financed by the private sector or completely financed by the public sector and there haven't been a lot of places where that intersection has really happened. I think there are some good examples where it's starting to happen so things like the bounce back scheme that government put in place in response to COVID and they then extended it onto the renewable electricity so I think we need to look at examples like that that have worked really well and see how we can build on those kind of successes and then I think also picking up another point from you Boitamello is I think that the private sector needs to be much more actively involved in the project development and project preparation process. My experience from the public sector was that often the conversations just seem to go past each other especially when you talk about incapacitated municipalities, they don't know what a bankable project is and so it's maybe better for the private sector to actively come in there and help them develop it and then when there is a financial viability gap, I think that dialogue with government needs to be a lot closer to be able to say to government look we've pushed this as far as we can is still this gap, what are maybe some of the options for closing that financial viability gap. Thanks very much Evel. Boitamello you sit very closely at the centre of a lot, have a range of government projects and particularly when it comes to financing strategies here, what do you think are the effective and innovative ones that we need to be looking at? Thanks. Maybe let me start off by saying that I don't always subscribe to the concept of innovation more effectiveness in the things that we do. I just want to quote a little bit from what comes from the NIPP 2050 national infrastructure plan which estimated that in order to meet our national development plan and SDG goals, we require 6.2 trillion between 2016 and 2040 and it said as of 2021 the financing gap was estimated at 2.2 trillion. Those are big amounts by any standard of measure. So with the fiscal that everybody knows is highly constrained. We know that we cannot close the gap on our own and as I said earlier on no is it desirable even if we had all the money in the world. So we need to look into alternatives, not necessarily innovation alternatives and one of the things that the private sector has been saying to us quite a lot is that funding or financing is not necessarily an issue from their perspective. If we can generate that pipeline that they can invest in and this is why at the moment a lot of work is going into improving the capacity and capability of the state so that that pipeline that Avril and others can invest in is generated, it's significant, it's continuously flowing and so on and so forth. One of the other things that the minister, the deputy minister spoke about was this issue of using blended finance and I agree Avril I think that we've sort of been thinking about blended finance in quite a narrow way which is not necessarily helping us. So when we established the infrastructure fund we had in mind that we need to create some kind of a blended finance platform and that's what we are using at the moment to try and upscale on that front. One of the things that also the minister spoke about as part of his budget speech recently was the introduction of financing instruments that are going to catalyze IFIs, international financing institutions, local DFIs and others so that we can deal with our capacity, capability and financing needs that we have so that in the not so distant future we can start crowding in institutional investors and the others. From a treasury perspective we are also big on the so-called alternative delivery mechanisms and that's related to private sector participation frameworks whether you are talking about PPPs, the regulations of well amendments to the regulations of which are out for public comment and I hope some of you have commented on them the issues of concessions and SPV type structures and that's exactly because we know that just by bringing in additional money into the system is not necessarily going to take us very far because of the capacity and capability issues that we have so we think that by bringing in expertise financing and those kinds of things we will be able to partner effectively with the private sector in a manner that helps us deliver on our infrastructure but a lot more effectively and efficiently. Thanks for Puttumella. James, I'm wondering what your thoughts might be in terms of what Avril and Puttumella have said. Anything comes to mind around your take on what they've said? I think the concept of the social and economic financial mechanisms which is an adage and it speaks a little bit to the triple bottom line kind of concept and how we address that and there is definitely much an appetite because people are starting to realize and the private sector is also starting to realize their connectedness through the failure and infrastructure systems and how it's starting to affect bottom lines. There's a lot more interest in seeing not only and you talked about the need for institutional capacity. So if we talk about sustainable infrastructure resilient infrastructure, there's obviously environmental sustainability, there's social sustainability we talked about, there's financial sustainability but there's also institutional sustainability to be able to manage that and not only the pipeline manage and get all the players together and have the right appropriate solution to the challenge but there's also the need to maintain it and operate it. In many cases the challenges with the financial system, how do we recover the money afterwards and how do we collect our normal tariffs and we have that, I'm kind of for what, half of that is failure to recover the revenues, other half is physical losses so we need to address both of them in various ways. Machidisa, your thoughts on financing strategies? Yes, so I mean I'm in support of what they've mentioned especially when it comes to like the capacity or what's happening maybe on the ground and provincial level when we consider financing strategies again it's so important to consider the social aspect because oftentimes we've seen it with education and health care. There's been quite significant investments in public sector education and health care and yet today we find ourselves like there are many schools in this country that are deeply underfunded, there's still schools that have pitiletry and toilets, there's still schools where there's so much overcrowding and you know how hot it is right now, you can imagine that there's so many schools that we work with in section 27 where there's many many learners that are in one classroom and we extend this to health care infrastructure as well where there's clinics and when we think about public health care often people have such negative views on the infrastructure and yet so much of our national budget has been going towards that and so you ask yourself if that's the case, why is that investment not reaching the intended beneficiaries and a big part of it is the under spending and the poor or the limited capacity at municipal level, at local government level and at provincial level to actually turn that infrastructure investment into the realization of these constitutionally protected rights. So I think if we are going to be thinking about ways to do investment in infrastructure in a way that actually does work, we need to be considering firstly considering what's currently happening, what are the barriers to realizing, to translating this investment into the realization of these constitutionally protected rights. Thanks very much Disa. Do you want to go ahead? Yeah sure, I mean I think we've covered it really nicely but just to have some building on James's comments around the private sector perspective and I think we've definitely moved into a phase where sustainability projects, ESG funding and so on is no longer a tick box exercise but it's actually showing real financial returns. So EY did some studies, we're thinking valuations and ESG ratings of companies and you see a strong causal relationship. There's companies that have better integrated sustainability within the organization in terms of their projects, they have higher financial return essentially. And actually also did a survey of global executives and 52% of executives actually found that financial returns and sustainability projects were much higher than they initially anticipated. So we're definitely moving into that sort of a different phase now that it's really, it does make business sense in many cases but I also agree with the other panelists that there is, it can't plug all the gaps and this is where the partnership comes in. Thanks panelists. I think there was some really rich points that came out of this discussion on the financing instruments, whether we call them innovations or alternatives that could be utilized. We recognize that there is clearly a need to close the gap that there's the fiscal is constrained and resources need to be leveraged from other parties that can contribute, provided that the right incentives and environment is being able to be provided. Some of the things that have been mentioned have been about shifting from balance sheet funding to project funding and asset based funding, lender based financing and then I think quite importantly some of the focus on blended finance that needs to be explored and as well as other financing instruments that will deal with the capacity and capabilities and then I think the institutional forms particularly of alternative delivery frameworks like PPPs and SPVs are something that needs to be further explored. So given the sense that we've got about some of the financial strategies that are going to be needed, I'm wondering this is a very sizable transition much to do so and this transition is one that can easily leave people behind. What do we need to do to make this climate infrastructure transition a just one where communities and citizens are at the center of it and that we're ensuring that they're equitable outcomes and that no one's left behind. Answering that, I think that question almost touches the person with experience. So I grew up in Imanatini with Bank which is one of the affected areas like coal mining communities and so every time I go back home I know recently there's been a lot of conversation around the climate change and the just energy transition more so than I ever recall growing up and while this is really great because and I think a big part of the reason why this conversation is happening is because the Presidential Climate Commission goes to Imanatini, goes to Secunda and Ermelo among others and actually engages with people who are affected by this decarbonization effort. However, the engagements have been quite limited to the people who work in the mine in a formal capacity and so what this means is because the mining sector is overwhelmingly male, it means that I think it's more than 90% of people who work on mines are male, it means that the conversational or how these decarbonization efforts are impacting the community are it's quite a masculine conversation. However, we know that climate change has been found to disproportionately impact everyone but it has been found to disproportionately impact women and so when you have a transition or you have policy and as a result like the financing that supports it and that financing doesn't acknowledge the gendered nature of the phenomena of like climate change, it means that we are entrenching the same thing you know we'll move into this decarbonization but we haven't considered what impact the women of these communities and we also know like as we know the triple challenge of poverty, inequality, and unemployment that we've been talking about, it also has a gendered lens to it because the rate of poverty gap among between women-led households and male-led households has been widening over the past decade. The face of unemployment in South Africa is considered the young black woman because we know that we have a stark gender inequality in the country that often manifests as gender-based violence and femicide and so all of this to say like just painting this image to say that if we are going to invest in infrastructure, if we don't consider this adequately enough we will risk, as I mentioned in the first question, we'll risk entrenching that and so the ways that I would recommend or as section 27 of the policy we've done and also as part of civil society coalitions like the budget justice coalition and is that we have been long advocating firstly for institutionalization of this public participation so making sure that both the budget but also the climate deals and all of that those are all shaped by the intended beneficiaries. The second way to improve that to ensure more equitable adaptation or more equitable transition is to also institutionalize interventions or mechanisms like the participatory human rights impact assessments and there's a lot of words but really saying that every budget decision, every climate decision, financing decision, every single line item we're actually thinking and engaging adequately with the intended beneficiaries on what impact does this have on the realization of these constitutionally protected rights. We also continue to advocate for gender responsive budgeting but also gender responsive climate financing. Just to address the issues that I've mentioned about the gendered nature of the impact of climate change but also the way that people on the ground are experiencing it and I think I've also touched on the current issues that we're facing, wasteful fruitless expenditure and underspending are areas that really do plague infrastructure projects specifically because of how expensive they are and how much money people could, you know, they're quite big projects and big investments and these have implications for the everyday person who uses infrastructure, who uses education, healthcare, who goes to school, public schools, who uses public health facilities and we need to urgently address those issues now and we can do so using both public policy, be it through fiscal policy but also working together strategically with the private sector with the intended beneficiaries to really shape as we keep mentioning a human rights response to our transition so that in 30 years time, 50 years time, however long we look at, I mean now we're reflecting on things from many thousands, even thousands of years ago the rock paintings and stuff but in future we can look back and say that actually we were able, we're not complaining about the same thing that we were complaining about 50 years ago, 100 years ago of unemployment and inequality, we would have done things differently and promoted equity in that way. Thanks very much, Machidi Sir. Your thoughts Angelica? Yeah, I mean I think it's exactly right Machidi Sir covered and I think it's just really the kind of inclusive planning involving communities like throughout the project, if it's an infrastructure investment taking them along and really understanding those local communities, what their needs are, what their demographic makeup is and so on and really kind of understanding the broader economics in direct reduced effects, we think about like a power station you mentioned, there's a lady who sells sweets and snacks outside the entrance, what happens to her livelihood, so it's all of these ripple effects that come through and I think you really need to understand that from going in as an infrastructure investor and I think broadly also in assessing the cost and benefits of infrastructure projects you need to think about social equity and how those cost and benefits are distributed amongst different stakeholders and understand and think about ways to mitigate some of those cost and benefits and then yeah and I think just it's also capacity building is also very important to make sure in so far as possible you involve communities so they feel part of these projects and I think also when you do speak a lot about the monitoring and valuation aspects but also involving communities from that perspective in terms of how the project is impacting them throughout. Thank you very much Angelika. I'd like to invite any of the other three speakers to comment on this idea of the just nature of the transition. So I think firstly it's important just to note that obviously the just, the transition is happening so I already mentioned how the private sector is busy financing renewable generation at scale and my worry is that almost government is lagging this process, there isn't a policy framework guiding it and so that means that generally we talk in water here, water follows the path of east resistance so it is the private sector the easiest thing is just to do what you've already done before. And so in my mind I think about first-rand back in the days of BEE when first-rand did its BEE deal they did a broad based deal before broad based was a thing and I think we need to start thinking about putting in place policy frameworks that compel the private sector to have to do these financing transactions in a just way. At the moment we don't even have clarity around what is a just transition project, what qualifies it as being just and I think if we could even start with clarifying that it doesn't have to be perfect, we can always amend it along the way but to start putting a line in the sand to say this is what you need to do you need to go and consult with communities etc etc in order for it to clarify as just and by the way we want you to be doing things of just projects I think that will start to create the impetus of moving the private sector in the right direction. Thanks very much. James you had a point on this? Yeah maybe quickly and I'll pass it over. So just on that I think one of the things really important, particularly from a climate risk perspective because when we talk about risk we often talk about components of hazard exposure and vulnerability so the hazard is how things changing, they change differently in different parts of the country we know what's happening in the southwestern Cape is quite different to happening up here or in KZN or in the Sutahilins for example kind of the exposure to that who is exposed and often it's the most vulnerable communities that are often exposed to these impacts kind of thing that we see increasing impacts and whether that's a flooding impact or water supply, water shortage, crisis kind of aspects and they're also often the most dependent on the natural systems and the other highly vulnerable part of the community or group is the environment kind of the natural system often the last to be impacted or carrying a bulk of whether it's our failing infrastructure or climate change impacts because we then have no more water to meet what is actually enshrined in our National Water Act which is a commitment to meeting basic human needs and environmental flow requirements and reserves so we see that aspect and even where we see the argument for augmentation so to augment water supply in the western Cape system it makes a clear financial economic justification it's multi times worth the question you know not so much can we afford to pay for it is can we afford not to pay for it but even there when you have those systems it tends to benefit those already in the formal system and the economic doesn't necessarily always transition without the support to say actually is everybody connected is there a transition in that system that benefits from that aspect so we need to look at that holistically and another interesting area that and maybe we'll come to when we talk about the environment is the interest in investing in ecological infrastructure many of these and again 30 years ago we started the working for water programs you know we have enshrined in that we have a global leading track record in that and private sector is now jumping on board to say if we want to meet our zero water targets which many of them have now we can latch on to South Africa's experience in removal of nasovatian plants working for wetlands fixing leaks all of those assets and there's a lot of interest from the private sector it's not going to close the 90 billion ran gap it's going to make some small impacts on that thanks very much James. We've got an opportunity to make a last comment on this particular question. Yes, yes thanks I mean one of the issues that I was engaging with a colleague on recently was around the issue of public participation right and we were talking about it in the context of the extortion that we see in the form of the so called construction mafia as well as the vandalism or sabotage that we sometimes see in some of these projects and you know the person made a very good point that part of the problem that we have is that legislatively we have to you know involve stakeholder engagements and do all sorts of things but you know depending on who is implementing the project sometimes they look at their own capacity and say this is one of those things that you can sort of do as a tick box exercise and sometimes they also you know start asking themselves at which point do you know involve communities when in fact what we should be doing is involve the community throughout the process and also in short we've got buy in and support the ownership they can take ownership of the project as they are being laid out and in relation to issues of inclusion right again this is using it's related to CPGs it's related to issues on the so called secondary objectives of procurement looking at the agenda issues local community development and so on and so forth and saying that if we want the community to be part of this particular project and to own it and protect it not just when you are building the infrastructure and you know beyond as well this is how I think we should be involving the communities in the public in general. Okay thank you there's some really rich points that have come out from all parts. I think one of the points made is that this transition is already happening and we need to better understand what does it just mean and clarify those things. I think there's quite an important point around understanding who is vulnerable in any particular project situation or whatever what Angelica referred to as the social benefits associated and how those are distributed and there's analysis that needs to go along with understanding who benefits and how benefits might be more equitable and then thirdly there's this idea of kind of involving communities throughout but creating an early sense of involvement in the early sense of ownership and potentially even ownership models for some of these things and then the ideas that were also brought about by Machadi so around the institutionalization of public participation but here we're saying from an early stage and participatory human rights assessments and so on as instruments that could potentially be utilized. So thanks for that rich conversation and a number of you talked about how the involvement of communities needs to extend into partnerships and we would like to kind of focus us on the last question before we break for audience questions is now how do kind of strategic partnerships start to enhance the delivery of climate resilient infrastructure projects particularly closing the financial gap that we talked about earlier but also closing the kind of project quality gap making sure that there's fiscal sustainability and I would add to that a kind of a just involvement of affected communities. How do we explore that idea of partnerships quite widely? James I'd like you to go ahead particularly given the water resources alien vegetation clearing words that you've been involved in. Yes absolutely and I think what we know and this is a challenge we've had in water and why we have integrated water resource management and the concept of an integrated challenge and it's becoming supercharged in a climate space, a social challenge space, this resilience space to offer it has been narrowed on both sides and in that you recognize it's everybody's challenge but everybody needs to be part of the solution and how do you balance those different voices and respect and a big component of that is trust and how you need to build trust. Many of the failures and challenges we've seen have been a breakdown in trust or a breakdown in communication and information sharing and that leads to unintended consequences that are deleterious to everybody. So kind of building that trust and the challenge with that is and this again speaks to our kind of need to grow and build and our procurement processes and our engagement systems. It takes time in many ways to build that trust and that relationships and taking it longer to imbue which in many cases unfortunately we don't have but partly because we've left it too late but we do need to invest in that trust building aspect of it and to understand from different perspectives whether it's technical, social, financial, environmental kind of that it all comes in and has equal respect but again we need to also be able to make decisions and adapt to those so mustn't hold us back from making decisions, we can't get the perfect decision we need to be able to make decisions but then build in the adaptability to be able to adjust them in a climate space but also in a social dynamic social space to adapt as we go along in that. That's a hard wire into fixed solutions. Cool, thanks. Avril, any thoughts from you around the strategic partnerships? Yeah, I think I just want to talk maybe on two main partnerships that I see. The one is I think changing relationships with DFIs and with philanthropic kind of funding. So I think what we're seeing at national treasury level is national treasury raising a lot more financing from the DFIs and we're also seeing that at the bank that historically we hadn't been raising funding, much funding from the DFIs, we're getting a lot more funding from the DFIs and obviously it's directed to these kind of themes that obviously comes with reporting requirements that becomes more onerous and it's also a different nature of funding long term and so on but I think there's an opportunity to leverage that a lot more and put processes in place to better utilize that concessional element of the DFI funding. On the philanthropic side, just within Firstrand, we are engaging much more closely with the foundations that we have so 1% of Firstrand's profits each year goes into a foundation. It hasn't really been investing that money so we're looking at how we can get better A, start investing and B, start investing where you can get the biggest bank for buck and I think that can extend much more broadly beyond just our foundations but to other philanthropic money in the private sector as well as with government and then I think an interesting conversation that I think we're really just starting on is around these cross border types of partnerships we were engaging with our colleagues who work in Mozambique and when you just think about Cora Bassa and the opportunities for energy and water associated with Cora Bassa you know when you draw the line where Mozambique starts and you just think in South Africa you overlook a whole lot of opportunities that are just beyond our borders so I think expanding those conversations into these cross border conversations is important. Great. Jelika would you like to come in on this topic? I think just to tie in on Averill's point around international partnerships and so I think that's also very important it's quite interesting in 2022 was the first year that foreign direct investment in clean technologies that she exceeded all other types of investments into Africa so I think that's just showing in terms of international investors coming in I think that's really key but of course I think international investment coming in needs to really have a good level of local context right and again that's with partnerships coming in and I think they bring new technologies have some different ways of thinking and sort of building our capacity with that with information sharing so I think that's quite key and I also completely agree on the point around thinking not just within our borders right within the region because we are highly integrated in terms of water and energy needs so I think it's definitely a more regional perspective needed Thanks. Put your thoughts from your side around what the other speakers have just said around partnerships. Look I think I can just make one additional point. I think as a government we often think that we always have to be the ones that are coming up with the solutions and the sense that I get is that that's not necessarily the case and for me that's where the issue of partnering with think tanks, research institutions and so on and so forth you know in order to bring out the best solutions but one of the other advantages that we've been taking of working with IFIs international finance institutions is their ability to bring in a global experts who can help us think through some of the issues that we may be going through for the first time but they may have experiences coming from other countries so using their convening power their ability to access global resources is one of the powerful ways through which we can you know partner with others What should you say? For me I just really would like to reiterate Errol's point about a strong public sector first of all I think that we what we would welcome is seeing investments in building the capacity of the public sector so that the public sector when they're in all these conversations in these meetings they are you know they're leading the way because if they don't there's you know lagging behind in terms of the policy and holding accounts and any consequence management if say within their partnerships like the private sector doesn't do what they're supposed to do you know the public sector in a lot of ways is a representative of the people and should be consulting with the people but also should be you know leading the way in that sense we see it a lot with currently with infrastructure projects in education, healthcare and social infrastructure projects is that oftentimes there will be agreements with implementing agents which are in the private sector but then the implementing agents don't do what they're supposed to do so the school isn't built within a year the classroom isn't refurbished what are the consequences behind that and there will be contracts or some form of legal agreements and you can just see that there needs to be some investment with in the provinces and in the local sector that when the private sector doesn't do what they're supposed to do they can hold them accountable or they can enhance the work of the private sector in that way so I definitely agree that with public-private partnerships or any form of strategic partnership we also do need a strong public sector as well and we'd like to see that investments we've seen a lot of budget cuts in various areas but we'd like to see some of those funds or under spending funds being redirected towards building the capacity of the state in the current moment urgently but also for our response in our transition that's currently happening and then the second part is also to not forget about civil society when it comes to strategic partnerships that there are so many, often times when we have meetings with parliament it seems like there are constraints in trying to think creatively about how to respond to our weakening economic outlook but when the civil society also has, we have economists, many of us have studied this work and we also have these academics who form part of it and have more creative ideas on how to build our on the revenue generation side, what ways or how to tailor our debt, our tax or our budget in a way that the burden of that isn't disproportionately carried by the most marginalized people so really just to civil society a strong public sector and really investing in that but also to not leave behind the civil society who makes all the noise and before it gets to protest level because we have a lot to offer as well in these strategic partnerships. Thank you for that. I think from this discussion there's a couple of really interesting points that came out, particularly about the different partnerships that could take place. The ones that Portia Mello talked about working with think tanks, working with research institutes that can convene power and draw people together. Errol talked about DFIs and partnering with them, philanthropic funders and then expanding the idea of partnerships to kind of cross-border partnerships but I do want to kind of stick on the couple of the points that came up that stuck out in the sense that for one partner is quite a critical thing so partnerships can only happen once the public sector to be able to do this and these are an important area of investment and capabilities if we want stronger and better partnering with both private sector and with civil society and that both the partnering with private sector would be for particular purposes in terms of leveraging resources but also them exercising oversight over the quality of infrastructure and certainly that same value around exercising oversight, making inputs into planning and there are a number of parts of the value chain that the civil society is particularly well equipped to do but very much a lot of this is about building trust and that means utilizing the opportunity to build capability with the public sector and to be able to strengthen trust building so we've completed the kind of panel questions and we've got some time left for questions from the online audience and from the audience and from the online audience as well so I'm going to open the floor now for a set of questions for the panel to be able to answer. Yes, can we get a mic to the person in the back and then we've got another hand at the back capacity or services not being properly delivered and I think this lack of trust over time obviously also means that when government and people engage things tend to be very slow so then I wanted to ask how do you think we can navigate or maybe how do you think we can negotiate the slowness of public participation because of this lack of trust versus the need to actually build infrastructure very quickly like the transmission developing plan for example says we need 14,000 kilometers of transmission lines in the next 10 years that means a very fast build of infrastructure so how do you negotiate that need to build very fast with the need to still engage with the community and that you're expecting that to not be quick because they don't trust you. Thank you. Thank you, great question. The person with the hand at the back corner is working so I'll just do that. Are you directing your question to anyone in particular or the panel in general? Okay, great. Okay, there's a hand here. Thanks, my name is Gelo. The question is to read to me a little bit, and I think we can all agree that municipalities and SOEs are not functional so is there a pathway of fixing municipalities and working with private sector because at the moment all this work happens at municipal level so if the banks can't finance it, if Treasury doesn't have money if municipalities are not working, what are we doing? Thank you very much. There was a hand here. I'm going to take two more questions and then give the panel a chance to respond. Good afternoon everyone. I'm Pomelele Kulgu from National Treasury. I just want to also give an idea of when we talk about the investment in infrastructure. We often talk about building new infrastructure but then we forget that there's also other infrastructures that are already there but are not maintained. It's either municipalities are struggling to maintain because they don't have funds or they just neglect it. It's only when there's a problem that's when we only consider investing in that infrastructure, in the old infrastructure. So this is something we also need to think about before we even invest in a new infrastructure. What about the one that is already existing but then still not maintained or it's neglected? Thank you. Sorry, your question is directed at any of the panelists? One more question and then we... Yes, sir. Hello. My name is Lin Dizwe. I'll direct my question to Ui Tumelo. I like the idea of having the TPP and government synergies. However, the experience that I have with these is that they don't work in a sense that there are no real success stories in those as there is a... I would say a big gap in terms of implementation. So in a nutshell the frameworks are there and they're very well written. However, when it comes to implementation it's that the administrators themselves don't understand how to implement and not only that when they are implemented you find that there is a issues of legal challenges in a sense that the administrators themselves are not sure whether to implement or not. So what mechanisms can you put in place to show that these frameworks themselves when implemented they can go from the point where they are initiated to a point where they successfully get to the end goal. Without having these legal ramifications that come in place and finding that at the end of the day three years are wasted in engaging in a project and then when the three years come they script. Thank you. Okay we've got a nice list of questions. I want to start with Machidiso. If you can respond to the frameworks question first and touch on anything else you want to touch on as well. Sure, so I think my answer will cover two people's questions so I hope it works out. This also relates to how do we build the trust in the government but also what are the best practices like areas that this has worked. I think those are really important questions because and areas of passion for me so I'm very happy to answer them. The first example for best practice is actually in our own context in South Africa. National Treasury actually piloted a pre-budget consultation in 2021 and 2022 I think so year one and year two and what they did is ahead of the national budget so the budget cycle beginning in June they opened up opportunities for people to participate or to share their insights on what they would like the budget or what are priority areas they would like to see in the national budget ahead of the next budget cycle or the next budget speech. That was actually while small it was actually very effective because there were insights or perspectives on how the budget impacts and how the budget impacts different people across the country depending on your demographics, depending on your geography wherever it is and why we say it's successful is because even those insights are still used today both in like locally in South Africa when we're discussing ways to institutionalize public participation but they also use them as an example internationally it keeps being brought up. Unfortunately that pilot has just ended as a pilot and so we could take it a step further and institutionalize those kind of ways so that we can ensure that moving forward the budget is actually all funding allocations are done and are shaped by the intended beneficiary. So I think that's a really good example of best practice with public participation and also I think earlier I had mentioned about the PCC the Presidential Climate Commission going into coal mining communities even though there are more areas that are going to be affected by decarbonization so I look forward to hearing what they have to say and outside of the lack of gender responsiveness just the way that they've been engaging with the people I'm just speaking again from personal experience I see there's a shift in the way that the people on the ground are experiencing the idea of decarbonization. It was met with a lot of resistance at the beginning because the question is what about our jobs what about this but now there seems to be the conversation has shifted to what are we thinking sustainably? Well these are some of the issues that we had with the coal mining companies and how things were done in Woodbank until then and now things have changed so I think even something like that there seems to be a change in the way that people engage with the government there used to be disinterest or resentment and not to say that's been eradicated completely because I would be lying but there's been meaningful steps in now people actually go to these convenings and there's more increased participation even among young people of course again it could be made better with a gender responsive lens and then with human rights impact assessments there are like EU member states who have been piloting to some extent or institutionalizing some form of impact assessments we have had some in South Africa but again we can do a lot better when it comes to that we can make them more participatory so yeah those are that's just the answer and just to close off my answer to say that this is also that question is a good question in the sense that we can also be thinking about what we can do where we can even be game changes as a country we know wherever we travel we've heard things about South Africa's constitution we instituted things in our constitution that were unprecedented at the time and so this climate crisis could be an opportunity for us to lead the way in that way because we know things that maybe the rest of the world needs to learn and yeah this is an opportunity for that thank you thank you okay so let's move on to this one of the other questions as well there was a question of being asked around municipalities and SOEs and the capacity do you want to respond to that and any other questions so I think that there's a much larger call on the private sector to work with municipalities and state and enterprises to develop these projects so I'm firstly an advocate of let's not wait until the system is perfect let's find one where there's an opportunity to get started let's get started let's learn from that and also maybe let's pilot something there and then other municipalities might get excited because they also want to be delivering as well as whichever municipality you piloted in I see it as also that the private sector financial institution we would need to probably partner with the DFIs for one thing bring in a lot of the technical assistance that Boitamelo was talking about you know they have the power to like institutions like the World Bank to bring in the international expert on municipal billing and collections let's take advantage of that bring them in sit with a specific municipality that is open to changing their approaches and let's pilot a few projects would be my approach I just wanted to pick up on also this question about the PPPs and also just to build on the point that you made about the strength of the public sector because I think one of the weaknesses around PPPs has been that okay there's a I think there's a unwillingness from the public sector to bring the private sector just generally but I think underpinning it is also a fear that the private sector is going to take advantage of the public sector that there's not confidence that we're going to be able as the public sector to negotiate a good deal and so I think this point around really strengthening the public sector's capacity to go in and negotiate a good deal for itself and have confidence that it's negotiated a good deal is really important in getting that PPP pipeline going Thanks very much April. So James earlier you were the one that mentioned trust first and there was this question around how do you negotiate trust at the same time as urgency of delivery? Do you want to take a answer in a question or renewal? It's easier than building trust but if I can just answer the question on the renewal question and then I'll get to the trust question but it's very much and that's concept of the work that we did here was to recognize that a big part of that funding gap is to fix the broken stuff that's in place and that's probably about half of what the investment gap is needed to maintain it. Unfortunately it's not the sexy stuff that's going to get the big international funds or the private sector involved or something like that so it is a real challenge. A lot of it should be and you can speak better about how municipal systems work often it's financed internally within its own systems through the way they collect tariffs through the shares and what we often see is that is not always optimally used so for example it's often not ring fence so water money gained in from water tariffs isn't necessarily spent on fixing water infrastructure it sometimes goes to fix all the other challenges it maybe fills the potholes it maybe fixes the broken buildings or something like that so often there's a challenge and there's a potential and this is one option it's out there to start ring fencing those particular services and then make sure that there's sustainability within those different sections and often sort of a utility type function which has its challenges but there's maybe benefits to there. It does then start to bring up the possibility to deal with your challenge around the municipality and the dysfunctional nature of them and to build where the private sector can sometimes get involved in those spaces from a PPP tab what we sometimes call this things called the performance based contracts for example where you have a challenge like fixing leaks or renewals where you should bring the private sector in to help and the kind of payment return is on the savings and benefits from the fixing you know how much they fix and how much water they've saved but then it's reliant on you still recovering the money and then pay to cover that. Just then this is where the question of trust comes in as well and you've pointed out one of the hesitancy is often and there have been cases like that I think in the energy sector where it hasn't worked because the private sector has often come in and it's quickly fixed the easy stuff which the municipality should have fixed anyway but then it's left the really hard stuff still hasn't been fixed and so it's kind of getting paid disproportionately fixing the challenges so that's where you need that strong private sector to negotiate that good deal and build that trust and say we're not going in immediately suspecting you of malice or false intent but we want to come up from a place of equal knowledge and we talk about the knowledge economy and that's how sort of Adam Smith and the whole economy functions how this proportional knowledge spaces so if your private sector public sector doesn't know what it takes to fix the leaks how can they negotiate a decent agreement and so you need to build on that capacity and again that's where some of the research we talked about partner research, institutions piloting it there are examples in South Africa where they try to pilot those through the strategic water partners network but we can learn from that and build that knowledge about what is a good deal, what works, what doesn't work and that maybe helps. Your foundation of trust is often information and knowledge in a common platform so that's again where policy research and innovation can support and build that trust and then bring in everybody to participate in that knowledge sharing. Thanks. Bochimela, there was a question asked about PPPs and the implementation process and strengthening that. Do you want to respond to that question? I do want to respond to actually two or three points and I want to start with our colleague from the National Treasury and what she's raising is an important question around maintenance neglect. One of the outcomes of the report, SAIC report, South African Institute of Civil Engineers one they acknowledge the extent of our infrastructure as a base as a country but what they are also showing is that the condition of our infrastructure has been declining over a period of time and a lot of it has to do with the maintenance neglect. How we would typically respond from a treasury and from a government perspective my sister I hope you know about IDMS. This is just government talk. In government talk we will say there's an IDMS infrastructure delivery management system and it talks about four things. The first one it says there's portfolio management. When you're thinking about infrastructure there's portfolio management. The second layer it talks about program management. So from your portfolio you need to be going through your programs and then from your programs interestingly it says go into your operations and maintenance. Once you've done that then you can start thinking about new infrastructure. So for us it was a shift that we wanted to introduce just in terms of how government thinks about some of these things but as he said maintenance is one of those things that are not particularly sexy, it's not the things where people are cutting ribbons and so on and so forth. And because of the financial mismanagement as well as governance issues money does come in and it does everything else except the maintenance of infrastructure. So I think that it's an important point. One of the things that we've started doing now on the so-called budget facility for infrastructure we say it's okay we can talk about new infrastructure or your brown fields but you must tell us about the full life cycle costs. You must anticipate them in budgets and you must tell us where those funding what those funding sources are going to be and you can sort of see the kind of existence that we have from people. Firstly telling us that you can't be asking us about something that will be happening seven years from now and we say well if you can't think of seven years from now just imagine in 22 years from now when our infrastructure is supposed to be long term. So I just wanted to deal with that issue a little bit and then there was a question here about SOEs and municipalities and this is just an extension of what others have said. It's true that these, well a lot of municipalities and SOEs are dysfunctional again mismanagement, governance and a whole range sometimes political interference and so on and so forth. So the decision that we have to make is do you build a capable public sector client before you can start rolling out your infrastructure or do you roll out your infrastructure at the same time as you are trying to build your capacity and capability and hence earlier on I was talking about the point that we don't just have a money issue we have a capacity and capability issue so with some of the delivery mechanisms that we are thinking about is precisely because we know that bringing in more money is not necessarily going to take us very far so if you bring in the capacity from the private sector discipline and so on and so forth we think that we should be building our capability capacity as well as delivering the infrastructure at the same time and I just want to also touch on the issue of scale sometimes part of what Avril was saying in relation to piloting and so on and so forth it's about the scale of the infrastructure that you have in mind. One, I'm a big proponent of programs rather than individual projects and in terms of doing programs I think that it is important that you sort of have the ability to learn from phase one to phase two phase two to phase three and so on so I think if we can do that we would really change the landscape the last point PPPs and look I can talk the whole day about PPPs because that's something that I really really really really like we do have some successes in the triple PES space and we usually quote the how-to there are several others that one could talk about we do have some successes what has happened in our PPP space specifically is that we've sort of seen the deal flow effectively dry up and part of it was that it was a global thing so it wasn't just in South Africa and it also didn't help at the time that we had a little bit of money so instead of pursuing PPPs we would pursue projects and program using the conventional method and part of the reason why we have these amendments to the framework is precisely because we no longer have the luxury of having money but we've also explicitly acknowledged that our capability is a problem and for that reason we do have to ensure that the frameworks is sort of up to date and can deal with issues of risk management and the like and there's no matter for that response on PPPs Angelica, I haven't given you a chance to respond to any of the questions so I'll give you a chance and then probably we can move to wrapping up thereafter. Touch on the first two questions I think they kind of related around trust and I'm going to take a risk and take off my economist hats and pretend I'm a communication strategist it's all about communication, right and we need to kind of get away from this mindset where it's published in the government gazettes or you have one of those small little white signs with a tiny, tiny writing on it, right and then that's public participation maybe attend a meeting with the local community it's an ongoing process and you've got to use different types of communication strategies right around that and different levels think about who your actual stakeholders are and the community is perhaps not good enough as a stakeholder and Mercedes pointed it out as well right, women, children, vulnerable groups and really think about how to target your communication and do so throughout the project, right and that's also in terms of how to speed up some of the public participation process if people understand from the beginning what they're getting themselves into, what they can comment on it's not about like being late in the game and say oh no I didn't agree to this kind of development and then also similarly around work and some examples I think the city of Cape Town was a really good example of communication around the water crisis, right and you know kind of bringing various communities together around sort of this common cause so perhaps there's lessons to be learned from there in terms of how that communication was done and I think that also just maybe the closing remark I think that's also it's not just about you know infrastructure in the ground and technology it's also around behaviour change but from everybody so I think that's just an important element to consider also just communication strategy is not just one and done it's ongoing, right and has to be all encompassing Thanks Geolika So in taking us concluding on this very rich discussion we've explored different aspects about financing climate resilient infrastructure in South Africa we've covered a number of areas and there's been a rich discussion that's come out I want you to know from panellists themselves in wrapping up is there one particular message that you would like the audience to be able to walk away with coming out of your thinking around climate resilient infrastructure and how to be able to deliver that in the South African context and Geolika I'm going to start with you and then work our way out in a minute of what is the key message that you'd like people to leave with Yeah I think, I mean I guess for me the key message is really the purpose of today around partnerships we've climate change and sustainability there's not about like one particular skill set right, it's a variety of different skill sets it's a variety of people's perspectives I think that it's all about having this integrated holistic approach and again it's around bringing communities with and communicating communicating effectively So look from my perspective it's really about effectively leveraging infrastructure investments to deliver on our socio-economic goals, socio-economic development goals of this country using the collective strength of the government and the private sector and for me I think if we can do that and embed issues of resilience not as an afterthought but actually as an embedded part of the planning execution and all sorts of other stages I think we would have done our job, thanks Thank you I think mine is quite simple it's the sort of analogy of the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time to plant a tree is now so I think let's get started let's not beat ourselves on the back for what we haven't done perfectly in the past let's not wait for it to be perfect let's get started today Thanks very much, James I'm very much a similar sort of concept I think the main thing is to really strengthen what we already have and stop us going backwards kind of thing before we start going forward and recognize the opportunities we have and how we've evolved into a resilient space and let's build let's fix the backlog, let's build these integrated systems let's build the trust present and then absolutely let's go forward but let's use information to support that and make good decisions bringing as much information as we can so that all parties can participate in that decision making going forward and then we can really get wheels and move forward I'm obviously with everything that all of these panelists have said which is really important and I think maybe my closing remarks for the everyone who's in attendance is to also just leverage the current existing public participation methods so it's easy we can talk about it here and there are ways that we could be better at it but we have and I think our national treasury ranks quite highly in terms of our budget transparency and among other sort of those kind of interventions and so I do think that as everybody who's in attendance we should also be thinking about how we can bring our voice into these conversations not just sitting here just extending it to if we have any ideas or any reflections of how the climate change and infrastructure is impacting us currently or we hear it from our family members we hear it from people in our community we should just you know we should take advantage of things like parliament submission so submitting to parliament is your democratic right as somebody who is in this country to do that and I think also Treasury does have opportunities to submit ahead of the election I mean sorry not the election ahead of the budget speech to participate in those kind of things but also speaking of the election I mean I think we have like smart people here but just to remember that these were hard-won freedoms for us to all be able to participate in that and we can make our voice be heard in May as well so I'd just encourage people to leverage that form of public participation as well thank you great and a fabulous note to end on is the call to action in terms of what you can be doing but some really important points coming through about the importance of partnerships about the inclusion and resilience going together about let's getting started and get going particularly built on what we currently have and one of those things we currently have are some of the participatory mechanisms that need to be able to build on and to be able to better use information and evidence in making decisions so thank you very much to this panelist you've been a great panel and I'm going to hand it over now to Dr. Kunal Sen for the closing remarks thank you very much thank you everyone can you hear me I think you can so I'm Kunal Sen the director of UNIWIDER and I'm very pleased to make the closing remarks which I'll try and keep really brief because not only have the panelists been very patient so have you the audience I'm excited for another Southern African Africa to with Inclusive Economic Development Acetide Program Policy Dialogue this is the second in the series in the second phase of the program we also celebrate a significant milestone in our journey as a program the signing of funding agreement which we did earlier today this marks a step towards advancing a shared goal of fostering inclusive growth in South Africa and I'm really pleased that all of you could be here today with a very important programmatic milestone and the policy dialogue both here and also online Acetide holds strategic significance for UNIWIDER since inception of the first phase of the program the focus has been on fostering a symbiotic relationship between research and policymaking and that was very evident in the discussion today over nearly a decade UNIWIDER has worked closely with South Africa utilizing data and research as a tool to address economic challenges we partner with key stakeholders such as the National Treasury South Africa Revenue Service and the UK Foreign Corp and also the European Union as today onwards and we committed to continue this collaboration with all our partners in the years ahead while corroborating to produce research is significant and that's what we do in Acetide are the priorities ensuring research uptake from today's discussion I believe we can all agree that gathering like this this afternoon will play a significant role as policy makers seek to respond to ongoing multi-pronged shocks manage unprecedented uncertainty and risk to do with climate change and pursue reforms towards an inclusive future the Acetide policy dialogues we engage in serve as important platforms for bridging the gap between research and policymaking by convening stakeholders from the private sector civil society organizations and the government that was so well represented in this panel today to facilitate knowledge exchange ensure that our research is visible and closely aligned with practical policy priorities from listening to today's discussion I was very pleased to say that our objectives have been largely satisfied some of you may have encountered new faces and perspectives and we always trying to bring new voices into this discussion which is precisely what we aim for we're meeting at a critical time with climate change challenges which are facing communities across the world the increasing frequency of extreme weather events rising sea levels and shifts of precipitation patterns some of the manifestation of this global problem that almost everybody in the world faces right now in response it is essential we work together to develop strategies for mitigation and adaptation this dialogue here that we had today the starting form of a long journey for us to realize the climate resilient future I was struck positively by the discussion that was so engaging and I also felt there were certain things that came up to me very strongly the question of just in the just transition how can we make the transition just also to think about looking at learning from the past as you think about the future also to bring in not only the private public sector but also the community's voices so that we can listen to those we want to reach out to in this ultimate goal of developing a climate resilient future and also to understand the balance between the private sector the public sector, building state capabilities and also to try to make the private sector as efficient as possible to develop efficient infrastructure all these kind of discussions came together very well today and I hope we can carry on discussion going forward so I would like to extend my thanks to the panelists who have really been great I want to name each one of you Angelica Galliga Avrilal State Bartimelo Gm Scales Leon Corsa and of course very ably moderated by Michenda Mudle thank you so much for doing that in closing I would like to express my gratitude to the Deputy Minister of Finance Dr. David Massando from the European Union who were present here early today and graced us with their presence colleagues in the National Treasury UKFCDO, the European Union and the South Africa Revenue Service for their partnership together we have formed strong networks and effective collaborations that will continue to enhance evidence-based policy fibrillation years ahead and exactly at the point of acetide I also want to acknowledge and thank Mr. Stute, Professor Francois Engelbrecht and Professor Imran Valodia for their generous hosting of this event and their unvarying support which is really instrumental in the success of the dialogue and also host this event in such a wonderful room without the collaboration and dedication this gathering would not have been possible the collective efforts and partnerships cultivated to acetide demonstrate our shared commitments to advance policy research and shaping the future of South Africa's development and we can look forward to further policy dialogues of this type in the years ahead so I'm going to close this event now by inviting you for a small reception just outside I think of this room or maybe a little bit maybe just outside the building I think and look forward to discussing further discussions going forward and perhaps also with Engelbrecht having an opportunity to talk to the panelists themselves thank you