Growth & Integration

Poor infrastructure is a critical barrier to accelerating growth and poverty reduction.

In Uganda, transport costs add the equivalent of an 80 per cent tax on clothing exports. In some regions of Africa, farmers lose as much as half of what they produce for lack of adequate post-harvest storage.

Economic growth is the main source of progress in poverty reduction. Extensive econometric work has established a generally robust relationship between infrastructure investment and national economic growth that putting an additional 1% of GDP into transport and communications investment on a sustained basis would lead to an increase of 0.60 percentage points in the growth rate of per capita GDP

Infrastructure investments also represent an enormous untapped potential for the creation of productive employment.