Promoting Pro-Poor Growth: Infrastructure

Insufficient, inadequate economic infrastructure is among the most pressing obstacles to achieving pro-poor growth. The need for increased investments in infrastructure and for making infrastructure management and maintenance more efficient is widely recognised. Renewed attention is given to infrastructure on the international development agenda.

Yet, major questions remain, including: What is the proper volume and quality of infrastructure? How should infrastructure investments be funded and managed? How to maximise infrastructure’s contribution to pro-poor growth? How can such investments be used to benefit poor people? These issues were considered by POVNET’s Task Team on Infrastructure in a series of workshops drawing on the expertise of bilateral and multilateral donors, partner countries, the private sector and civil society.  By identifying weaknesses in their earlier donor approaches, POVNET developed the following four principles to guide efforts by donors to promote pro-poor growth in partner countries through infrastructure:

• use partner country – led frameworks as the basis for co-ordinated donor support
• enhance infrastructure’s impact on poor people
• improve management of infrastructure investment, to achieve sustainable outcomes
• increase infrastructure financing and use all financial resources efficiently.

Promoting Pro-poor Growth: Infrastructure elaborates these four guiding principles, and their application to various sectors, including transport, energy, information and communication technology, and water, sanitation and irrigation.