Session Description: Delivering Africa’s infrastructure and industrial ambitions requires engineers at scale. Yet the continent faces persistent shortages in advanced technical skills, weak links between academic training and applied industrial needs, and uneven institutional capacity for professional certification and continuous learning. These constraints are becoming more acute as global demand for engineering talent rises sharply, driven by the energy transition, digital infrastructure, and reindustrialization strategies in advanced and emerging economies. For Africa, this creates a structural risk: a growing share of its high-skilled labor may be absorbed abroad, while domestic delivery systems remain constrained by skills mismatch and limited technical leadership. This session examines how African countries can expand, modernize, and retain their engineering workforce by improving education quality, strengthening applied training, and building innovation ecosystems that provide high-value opportunities domestically.
Africa’s infrastructure gap is often framed as a shortage of assets, but the deeper constraint is weak network performance. Many transport corridors do not reduce trade costs because they are not integrated with ports, logistics systems, and border processes. Power systems remain unreliable because transmission, distribution, and dispatch are not strengthened alongside new generation. Urban systems underperform because water, sanitation, mobility, and housing are planned in silos. These fragmentation failures translate into measurable economic costs: higher logistics expenses, lower firm productivity, and reduced competitiveness. This session examines how African countries can shift from project-by-project infrastructure expansion to network-based infrastructure strategy, focusing on institutional architecture and service performance.
Session Description: Across Africa, infrastructure delivery is constrained less by a lack of projects than by the quality of execution—delays, cost overruns, procurement inefficiencies, and weak asset performance after completion. These failures do not only raise fiscal costs; they reduce economic returns and erode investor confidence. Digitalization and AI offer a pathway to tackle these constraints by improving how projects are planned, procured, coordinated, monitored, and maintained across the full lifecycle. In many contexts, the binding constraint is fragmented delivery: disconnected planning and procurement, limited interoperability across agencies and contractors, weak data architectures, and little lifecycle accountability once assets are built. “Digitalizing the project delivery ecosystem” means integrated workflows and trusted data from design to procurement to construction to maintenance. This session will discuss where these tools can credibly improve efficiency and integration, and what institutional conditions are required for execution gains.
Session Description: Africa’s long-term development will depend less on episodic growth accelerations than on the economic foundations that sustain productivity and structural transformation: reliable infrastructure, competitive energy and logistics systems, human capital, and a stable macroeconomic environment that can support long-horizon investment. Yet many economies remain trapped in low-productivity equilibria because these fundamentals are weak: power is unreliable, connectivity is costly, skills formation is uneven, and technological diffusion is slow. At the same time, macroeconomic volatility and tight fiscal space limit the ability of governments to finance infrastructure, maintain public services, and sustain credible industrial policy. This session focuses on the system-level conditions—public goods, institutions, and macro-fiscal discipline—that make industrialization feasible.
Session Description: Industrial policy has re-emerged as a central tool for economic transformation across Africa. Morocco and Senegal have both pursued active strategies to strengthen domestic manufacturing, attract investment, and develop competitive industrial ecosystems. This conversation brings together the Ministers of Industry and Trade of Morocco and Senegal to share practical perspectives on how industrial policy is implemented in practice, including the role of government in coordinating investment, supporting industrial development, and positioning African economies in evolving regional and global markets.
Session Description: Africa’s infrastructure and transition agenda cannot be financed through public budgets alone, yet private capital mobilization remains constrained by bankability gaps, high risk premiums, and weak project pipelines. Many projects fail at the preparation stage due to weak feasibility studies, unclear contractual structures, poor risk allocation, and limited performance data. Financeability is not only a financial issue; it is also an engineering one. Projects designed without robust lifecycle costing, resilience standards, and credible operations and maintenance plans tend to generate higher risk perceptions and lower investor appetite. This session examines what investors and lenders require to finance engineering projects at scale—credible regulatory frameworks, transparent procurement, predictable revenue models, fiscally sustainable risk-sharing arrangements, and the financing instruments (blended finance, PPPs, guarantees, insurance, green and sustainability-linked instruments) that can support pipeline development rather than isolated transactions.
Session Description: Africa’s energy transition will not mirror that of advanced economies. Many power systems still face supply gaps, weak grids, and limited storage, which makes decarbonization above all a sequencing challenge: lowering emissions while expanding access, preserving reliability, and keeping electricity affordable. Several countries are also fossil-rich, and hydrocarbons remain central to energy security, fiscal revenues, and industrial strategy. The transition therefore hinges less on targets than on making systems “renewables-ready”—reinforcing transmission and distribution, improving dispatch and system operations, expanding flexibility through storage, demand response, interconnections and, where relevant, gas-fired balancing capacity designed with strict guardrails to avoid lock-in (contract structure, methane performance). Procurement and contract design are central to aligning these choices with performance and reliability. This session examines how engineering and market design can translate these constraints into credible decarbonization pathways.
Session Description: Across Africa, persistent skills mismatches continue to limit employment opportunities and constrain business growth. Addressing this challenge requires closer alignment between education systems, labor market needs, and employer demand. This conversation explores how public–private partnerships can help bridge this gap by strengthening vocational training, improving skills matching, and creating pathways from training to employment. Drawing on practical experience, the discussion will focus on how governments and firms can work together to better connect skills development with evolving labor market needs.
Session Description: Africa’s mineral endowment is becoming strategic as global demand for critical minerals rises, yet value capture remains limited because extraction is weakly connected to processing, component manufacturing, and downstream industrial capabilities. The prevailing model, exporting raw materials while importing higher-value refined and manufactured inputs, keeps countries exposed to commodity price cycles, thin local linkages, and external supply-chain dependence. Resource transformation is a mine-to-industry systems challenge shaped by requirements that are unusually stringent in extractives: dependable low-cost power, heavy logistics and port capacity, industrial water, compliant waste and tailings management, and traceability/ESG and carbon constraints that increasingly condition market access and financing. The key question is not “value chains” in general, but how to design industrial ecosystems around minerals that are competitive, bankable, and socially legitimate.
Session Description: Water stress is becoming a binding constraint on development across much of Africa, with direct consequences for cities, agriculture, health, and industrial expansion. Beyond scarcity, the degradation of natural water capital—declining aquifers, watershed deterioration, and ecosystem stress—is increasingly undermining long-term supply. At the same time, weak system performance remains a major challenge: high non-revenue water, aging networks, inadequate storage, limited wastewater treatment and reuse, and persistent service gaps between urban and rural areas. Climate variability is amplifying these pressures, raising both the frequency of shocks (droughts and floods) and the long-run costs of maintaining reliable supply. This session examines how engineering and institutional reforms can jointly deliver water systems that are resilient, financially sustainable, and socially equitable under growing climate stress.
Policy Center for the New South
Rabat Campus of Mohammed VI Polytechnic University
Rocade Rabat Salé
