Watch the event below:
Featuring
Marianne Fay
Chief Economist, World Bank
Jay Ireland
Africa CEO, General Electric
Elizabeth Littlefield
President and CEO, Overseas Private Investment Corporation
Tam Nguyen
Global Head of Sustainability, Bechtel Corporation
Host
Charles Kenny
Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development
This year, the world’s leaders will agree to a set of Sustainable Development Goals that aspire to massively improved infrastructure provision by 2030 in sectors from energy through water and sanitation to communications. The estimated price tag connected to the infrastructure targets in the SDGs is somewhere above $1 trillion a year. The scale of these financing needs suggests they cannot be met by the public sector alone, and most discussions of the SDGs and Financing for Development calls for private sector engagement and involvement. Far less advanced is discussion on the potential scope of private sector financing, the barriers, and national and international public sector tools to leverage that finance. Is there scope for considerable additional international private finance of infrastructure in poor countries or will the vast majority of financing remain public, as it has been in the past?
CGD will host a 90 minute panel discussion on how to achieve progress in private finance for infrastructure in developing countries, and what that progress would look like. The discussion will focus on the barriers to more private investment flowing into infrastructure in developing countries and what role there is for donors in overcoming those barriers. It would be grounded in realism about the deep-seated nature of those barriers and the limited resources donor countries can put on the table.
