ECOWAS Seeks Cooperation from Asia for Infrastructure Construction

Hello and welcome to this edition of Africa Express, here on China Radio International. As always, I'm your host, Wei Tong.

The Economic Community of West African States or ECOWAS aims to attract more cooperation from Asia, including China, into the infrastructure construction of the region. Our correspondent, Chen Simeng, talked with David Kamara, director of Infrastructure Department under ECOWAS, who attended the just-concluded annual meeting of the African Development Bank in Shanghai. He first introduced some key projects to be carried out in West Africa and conveys his expectation of investment from Asian countries out of the potential market in this region.

"We have a regional project in the power sector, which was called the African power pool. The objective of this project is to establish a common market for trade and energy in West Africa. First of all, we want to strengthen the national electricity grids. After that, we want to interconnect the grids so that we can form one market for trade electrical in West Africa. We have a transport master plan. That is a master plan of an old highway linking these capitals as well as key economic centers in the communities. In addition, we have a program for the interconnection and rehabilitation of the existent national railways and the interconnection so that it'll be multi-motor traffic in West Africa. We are trying to liberalize the air transport sector so that people can invest in the air transport sector in our region. And one of the outcomes of that is that we are trying to establish one regional airline, which we can strengthen with the assistance of partners from China so that air transport in the sub-region can improve our traffic links with other regions. Similarly we have a program in telecommunication sector. We want to establish a common market for telecommunications. We want the entire West Africa region to be regarded as one market. So if a company here in China wants to invest, you have to look at the sub-region, not just one country. Now there are many advantages with that because if you take the whole region, it's about 350 million people. That is a much better market if you take small countries."

2. Do you have any cooperation with Asian countries at present?

"We have already started the ball rolling with India. Japan has always been a traditional partner here always contributed to cooperate with the World Bank. As you know the infrastructure projects need a lot of money. We are already getting substantial assistance from our traditional donors in the west. We want to diversify our sources of financing. We want China and other Asian countries to get involved in implementation of these programs."

3. Why do you want cooperation or an investor from Asia, or from China?

"China, like other Asian countries, is just evolving from the state we are now as far as the development of infrastructure is concerned. So we want to learn from their experience. We also know that their technology could be better. We also know that China has implemented projects in some of our member states. They have comparative advantage in certain areas. The construction cost of some of these programs is now at the expense of efficiency or quality. Also it is possible China has own experiences what it means to be underdeveloped. We can get more concessionary loans from China. We can get loans on more favorable terms from China. Then we can get from our traditional partners. China has always been part of capacity building for our institution. Right from the 50s even for independence, we received a lot of assistance from China. And even now we are still sending many of people to train here so that we can benefit from the experience of China, of Chinese technology institutions to build up our own institutions so that we’ll be able to manage our own affairs."

4. More and more foreign investors pay attention to the infrastructure construction in Africa. What do you make of the trend? Why is it happening?

"The reason is that we dealt a working infrastructure hardly anything else works. If you have adequate infrastructure, it makes it better for investment. In the long time, it is an investment for the beneficiary countries as well as for the investor itself because it creates a more favorable climate for investment. That is why our partners also regard it as an important element of the entire investment process."

That was David Kamara, director of Infrastructure Department under ECOWAS, who attended the just-concluded annual meeting of the African Development Bank in Shanghai. Now that concludes this edition of Africa Express. I am Wei Tong. Thanks for listening and bye for now!