When Dr Donald Kaberuka took over as president of the African Development Bank (AfDB) in 2005, one of his first acts was forming a little-known task force that would define the Bank’s agenda in the next decade.

Four men — two civil engineers and two economists — carefully chosen from Anglophone and Francophone regions to bridge this historical chasm, were given the task of solving one piece of the big puzzle that is the crisis of development in Africa.

In the early 2000s, Africa was undergoing a crisis of multiple dimensions: One, the structural adjustment era was just coming to an end.

Between 1980 and 2000 average income had dropped by 20 per cent — a clear indicator that the supposedly market friendly reforms pushed by the IMF and the World Bank had failed to deliver meaningful growth and worsened poverty levels.

Two, insurgencies and heavily armed banditry had become endemic, feeding into the stereotypical image of a continent saddled with never-ending wars. Ethiopia was in the grip of the worst famine since the famine of 1984.

The long-run prospects for growth were considered so bleak that the London-based Economist magazine infamously called Africa “ thehopeless continent.” Afro-pessimism was indeed a big topic at the time.

In 2005, during the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland — four months before Kaberuka began his first term as AfDB president — former British prime minister Tony Blair described Africa as a “scar on the conscience of the world.”

Unfazed by all these negative vibes from the Gleneagles summit, back at AfDB’s headquarters in Algiers, four men had to come up with an idea that would radically shape the Bank’s agenda for the next decade and transform the fortunes of the continent.

The economists in the room haggled over expanding trade opportunities with the US under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa), or renewing the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with the European Union.

These proposals were reasonable, but engineers being engineers, they could not fail to find a structural flaw with this idea.

The civil engineers in the room were of the opinion that neither export-led nor private sector-led growth would succeed would do unless African governments work collectively to close the continent’s infrastructure gap.

They argued that the infrastructure on the continent still served the needs for which it was built for more than 100 years ago — that is, to link extraction centres in Africa to manufacturing and distribution hubs in Europe and now in southeast Asia.

They wanted to find a way of dismantling Africa’s enclave economies and link them so that Africans could trade more, communicate and exchange ideas.

With poor roads and rail networks, congested ports and high fuel costs, moving a billion people, commerce, information and capital on six per cent of the earth’s total surface area is a logistical nightmare.

Roads are sparse considering the continent’s vastness. Only one-third of Africans living in rural areas are within two kilometres of an all-season road.

READ: Africa needs massive investment in infrastructure: IMF

The amount of power generated by 48 countries in sub-Saharan Africa is roughly the same as what Spain generates.

In a recent article in the Foreign Policy magazine, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf captured this power deficit by saying that the 80,000-seat Cowboys Stadium in Texas in the US uses more electricity during NFL games than her country of 3.8 million people does in a day.

It was against this backdrop of deficiencies in energy and transport, which present a major bottleneck for Africa’s integration efforts, that AfDB decided to channel its resources to infrastructure.

Since 2006, the AfDB has signed more than 50 public-private partnerships (PPPs) across Africa. Submarine cables are being laid around the continent; new airports are coming up in Senegal and Tunisia, while the $100 million Lake Turkana Wind Project in Kenya will be the largest wind farm in Africa with an installed energy capacity of 300MW.

Other power projects include the $25 million KivuWatt Project in Rwanda the $64 million Kribi Power project in Cameroon, and the $38 million Thika Power project in Kenya.

Currently, 60 per cent of the bank’s operations involve funding infrastructure because in the next decade, most of Africa’s colonial-era airports and ports will need an upgrade as Africans become interconnected and trade more with each other.

The bank has earmarked $4 billion to $5 billion a year for infrastructure projects. In 2011, AfDB approved 184 projects worth $9 billion. The recently launched Africa50 Fund is targeting $10 billion of equity from an initial capital of $3 billion, to finance infrastructure projects.

But this is barely enough to meet the continent’s infrastructure deficit, which stands at $90 billion annually between now and 2020.

But African leaders are now forming infrastructure coalitions that will connect 16 landlocked countries to transport hubs from Mombasa and Durban to Lagos. These joint projects can also benefit from economies of scale.

Cyrus Njiru, a former transport permanent secretary in Kenya, says these regional projects will be the game changers in Africa’s development.

“The Northern Transport Corridor connecting Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo generates more than 80 per cent of Kenya’s GDP; imagine what a second corridor would do?” asked Mr Njiru, who has also worked closely with other governments in implementing joint regional transport corridors in East and Southern Africa.

The East African Community, the most advanced regional economic community on the continent, is now fixing the century-old “Lunatic Express” with a standard gauge railway that will eventually link Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda.

The new railway line is part of the bigger $25 billion Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia Transport (Lapsset) project launched last year by Kenya, Ethiopia and South Sudan. Lapsset includes the construction of a railway, highways, ports and airports linking the three countries.

ALSO READ: Tanzania, Burundi plan standard gauge railway project

Another project launched jointly by the seven governments of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (Igad) and the European Union is the $6.7 billion Horn of Africa Initiative.

The project includes a set of road corridors that will link landlocked countries in the region to seaports in Djibouti and Mombasa.

Somalia will also be connected to the corridor as Igad hopes the project will not only increase trade in the region, but also improve cross-border co-operation on terrorism, migration and peacekeeping.

The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa), the EAC and the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) are also jointly implementing infrastructure projects within the three RECs.

A $1.8 billion project is currently ongoing to rehabilitate the Northern and Central Corridors, which connect Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda, and also provide port access to the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan.

The Comesa-EAC-SADC is also working to rehabilitate the North-South Corridor, the busiest transport network across the 27 countries in the common market.

The three RECs will spend $9.1 billion to rehabilitate the 10,000km road that links Botswana, DRC, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

In the north, another cross-border project is the trans-Saharan highway that will connect Algeria’s capital to Lagos in Nigeria.

The 9,000km road, dubbed the “Road of African Unity,” will facilitate trade and social exchanges between North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa by overcoming the barrier posed by the Sahara desert, and the AfDB has already approved $184 million for the Algeria-Chad-Niger section of the highway.

Nigeria is also reportedly planning $20 billion 4,400km Trans-Saharan gas pipeline passing through Algeria to Europe. Nigeria’s gas reserves are estimated at 5 trillion cubic metres — equal to roughly 10 years of consumption for the EU.

Europe is actively looking for alternatives to Russian gas, and with this pipeline, the huge gas finds off the east coast of Africa will find a ready market in the EU, whose consumption will rise by 43 per cent by 2030.

But the question many ask is whether these multi-billion dollar transport infrastructure projects will drive Africa’s growth or become “highways to nowhere.”

In the 1980s, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund stopped funding infrastructure projects but recently, the IMF has changed its tune and joined the growing list of international institutions calling for more investment in infrastructure.

In its latest World Economic Outlook, the IMF says the “time is right for an infrastructure push,” adding that for every dollar spent on infrastructure, economies can expect an increase of 40 US cents of GDP in the first year and $1.50 or more after four years.

Furthermore, the IMF has advised governments to borrow to finance their public investment projects because the boost to GDP a country gets from increasing public spending offsets the rise in debt, “so that the public debt-to-GDP ratio does not rise.”

The IMF seems to be saying public investments in infrastructure could pay for themselves if the projects are carefully chosen.

Poor infrastructure has been estimated to shave at least two per cent off Africa’s annual growth, a paper by the World Economic Forum on Africa estimates, adding that one per cent of GDP invested in transportation and communication on a sustained basis enhances the GDP per capita growth by 0.6 percentage point.