THE EVENT

The first G8 Corporate Africa Infrastructure Investment Conference was a great success. It achieved a good attendance and established a reputation as being built around good organization with the qualities to become a leading international event supporting Africa’s bid to build infrastructure capacity. It took place at the Royal Garden Hotel, Kensington, London, UK, from 28 to 29th June 2009. The G8 Corporate Africa Infrastructure Investment Conference 2009, was supported by the EU Trade Commission, The UK Department for Business Innovation and Skills, Governments of Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana and South Africa. These countries all sent Ministerial representatives, excluding South Africa who failed to show.

The Organizing Committee and support structures had initially intended to create a platform upon which financiers, development agencies, international investors from G8 nations and other stakeholders in infrastructure development could engage in conference on an annual basis: a conference to examine opportunities for collaborations, partnerships, and funding, leading into building of more capacity in primary infrastructure across Africa’s regional economic communities. This was to include:

• Exploring new ways of how governments in collaboration with each other, international partners and investors could increase their capabilities to meet the challenges of filling gaps in funding key infrastructure programmes and projects.
• Investigate the history of infrastructure development programmes in a targeted African nation looking at amounts of investments exploited during different eras - pre colonial, colonial, and post colonial - and projections of amounts of investments needed for Africa to become competitive in the global economy in the next 50 years.
• It was also to promote the regional infrastructure objectives and initiatives of the Africa Union and NEPAD and their members’ programmes and projects.

The programme for the G8 Corporate Africa Infrastructure Investment Conference 2009 consisted of several formats including:

• plenary sessions, featuring many well-known and thought provoking experts
• keynote speakers and intense highly interactive discussion sessions