As we prepared to wrap up this book and send all the chapters to our publisher, I had the chance to travel to Africa to test, with a group of local scholars and policy makers, the central argument: that underlying the diversity of forms of organizing set up to develop basic infrastructure and in this way promote socio-economic development lies a duality of building institutions and building technology – two desirable objectives with underlying design attributes that make them organisationally incompatible. The setting was the city of Livingstone, a stone’s throw from the majestic Victoria Falls – two places charged with references to a bygone Western colonial era which, for good and for ill, is part of Africa’s history.

Against the backdrop of an increasing demand for efficient, effective and sustainable new infrastructure developments in Africa, this study examines two rapid railway transportation projects to explore alternative ways of organising. The analysis focuses on the Gautrain railway system in South Africa and the Addis Ababa City Light Rail Transit (AA-LRT) system in Ethiopia. Adopting a comparative approach, we investigate how the two capital-intensive project organisations succeeded in overcoming system bottlenecks, and in dealing with complex interfaces with the institutional environment. Our focus is on the structures designed by the project promoter to acquire the necessary formal resources – finance, human capital, certification and land – and to manage the interdependency with the environment. We also investigate the extent to which the developments succeeded in creating broad value beyond the private value appropriated by the private firms involved in design, construction and operations. In agreement with organisation design literature, our analysis suggests the design of the governance structures is directly influenced by the political and sociocultural environment. Therefore, we argue, designing project organisations to deliver infrastructure in Africa is not a problem with a one-size-fits-all solution.

The upgrading of informal urban areas is a pressing challenge for meeting the UN’s goal to make cities a pathway to sustainable development. Complicating co-ordinated collective action is the diffusion of decision-making authority and control over critical resources in a context where there is a shortfall of institutions. Tackling this grand challenge thus requires designing inter-organisational contexts capable of navigating many institutional voids, including ill-defined property rights, weak regulation and inefficient markets. In this chapter, we draw on a case study of a development project that granted decision rights to the poor to upgrade Cairo’s ‘garbage cities’ to further our understanding of this organisational challenge. Our aim is to illuminate a form of organising that is neglected in management scholarship. Its main attribute is the way by which contractual governance is supplemented with a consensus-oriented collective-action structure. Our main contribution is to theorise a trade-off central to this form of organising: collective action, under the shadow of contractual governance, economises on the high transaction costs that would otherwise be incurred to resolve ill-defined property rights. However, enfranchising the poor brings into the organisational boundaries the costs of collective action and risk of a tragedy of the commons.

Regional electricity systems, or power pools, can reduce the cost of providing electricity and improve system reliability through co-ordinated use of energy resources. Realizing these benefits requires a strong political will to co-operate combined with careful market design supported by technical, economic and institutional analysis. In this chapter, we present some of the unique motivations for power pools in Africa, describe the current status of pooling arrangements on the continent, study in detail the regulation of transmission in the Southern African Power Pool (SAPP) and identify some improvements to the present rules. Our approach combines mathematical modelling of the SAPP system using linear programming with analysis of regional institutions and their role in promoting efficient investments as well as efficient market behaviour. We have investigated several market-design questions, such as how to identify, implement and allocate costs for necessary regional transmission investments. Our regulatory proposals developed for the SAPP could be feasible options for other regional systems in Africa that face similar institutional and technical challenges in developing regional infrastructure.

In this chapter we set out to consider what is needed to ensure that Africa’s infrastructure remains financially sustainable throughout its life cycle. Managing the operational phase is at least, if not more, crucial than ensuring a project is constructed in the first place, but evaluation, particularly in relation to affordability, is weak even at the global level. We identify that in Africa there are frequently weak systems of governance, fragile and risky political institutions and lack of financial management capacity. We empirically examine five Ghanaian projects in electricity generation, water desalination, and the use of private finance to deliver and operate university buildings, to demonstrate financial and accountability shortcomings. We identify four methods that could improve financial sustainability for African infrastructure projects: namely, the establishment of independent infrastructure agencies; training and salary support of competent government technical staff; a move to more transparent decision-making; and the introduction of project monitoring and contingency planning.