LAUNCHING OF THE COUNCIL FOR INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT (CID) IN THE CONTEXT OF PIDA IMPLEMENTATION

ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA, JANUARY 2014

Opening Remarks Of The Auc Commissioner For Infrastructure And Energy at

 
• Your Excellency AUC Chairperson and Chair of the Council for Infrastructure Development,
• Honorable Ministers, Chairs of Conferences of African Ministers responsible for Transport, Energy, ICT and Water,
• Your Excellency, Commissioner in charge of Rural Economy and Agriculture,
• Your Excellency President of the African Development Bank,
• Your Excellency Executive Secretary of United Nations Economic Commission for Africa,
• Your Excellency Chief Executive Officer of NPCA,
• excellences CEOs of Regional Economic Communities,
• Distinguished participants,
• Ladies and Gentlemen, All protocol observed.

It is my great pleasure to welcome you all at this first meeting of the Council for Infrastructure Development (CID), a key organ of the Institutional Architecture for Infrastructure Development in Africa (IAIDA).
This is the opportunity to recall that after PIDA adoption in January 2012 by the 18th AU Summit, it was also requested to the AU Commission to operationalize the IAIDA as the PIDA implementation framework. In this context, this CID meeting was prepared by its technical bogy, the Infrastructure Advisory Group which held its first meeting on September 17, 2013 in Pretoria, South Africa.
I particularly recognize the presence of all members of this new structure established to better coordinate the development of regional and continental infrastructure, so as to ensure coherence and harmony across sectors and speed up implementation of the priority projects identified within the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa.
In today’s meeting, we are proposing two main topics, namely:
(i) The CID Rules of Procedure that you are requested to consider and adopt with amendments if any;
(ii) Progress report on the PIDA PAP implementation, which particularly provides information on the updating of the PIDA PAP projects fiches, PIDA Financing Study, PIDA Capacity Building for the main stakeholders involved in PIDA implementation (RECs, NPCA and AUC) as well as on the Communication Strategy.
It will be also a good occasion to be informed on the planned 2014-2015 PIDA-PAP Implementation Road-Map indicating the main activities to be undertaken.
The conclusions and recommendations of your meeting such as the adopted CID Rules of Procedure will help to take the concrete measures and to identify specific priority actions, in the coming months, in order to accelerate the implementation of PIDA-PAP projects; and it will also serve for preparing the integrated report on the infrastructure to be submitted to the AU Summit.
I thank you in advance for your cooperation in implementing this agreement.
I wish you a successful meeting.
Thank you for your kind attention.