The money is there but whither are the bankable infra projects??

The money is there but there is a dearth of good commercially viable infrastructure projects. This appeared as one of the most resonating “truisms” reverberating in the Global Infrastructure Forum 2018, held in Bali over the weekend — 13th October 2018.

With the overarching theme, “Unlocking inclusive, resilient and sustainable technology driven infrastructure”, the GI Forum — a collaboration with public and private sectors — included four sessions chaired by Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) and United Nations (UN).

Crossing this chasm, bridging the gap — heck, following the pot of gold for economic and/or commercial reasons should not be that tough. So what is holding us up here??

Here are a few of my impressions (in a 3 parts’ series) from the session — seen from the lens of a tech evangelist and specifically on how blockchain can help address infra deficit gap — after all the theme was on tech driven infrastructure!

Part 1: Reflections on “Sustainable Infrastructure through technology“

Part 2: Reflections on “The Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) — Catalyzing Private Finance” & “Financing the global infrastructure gap — development and innovation in financing modalities for sustainable infrastructure and derisking”

Part 3: Reflections on “Good practices in scaling up investments in infrastructure” & “Climate finance” along with Sentiments amplified and my key take-aways from the forum

What follows is part 1 of this 3 series posts. If you have any interesting comments or notes to share, or better still synergies to explore — do holler.

Sustainable Infrastructure through technology

Injection of technology in infrastructure is vital. Most of the panelists and other delegates were quite optimistic on embodying technology and innovation into infrastructure. Some immediate examples of usage of tech:

· Risk profiling as well as assessing upstream lending capacities — using data anlaytics, data modeling, scenario modeling and other tools

· Globalize capital

· Leverage blockchains for having transparent data sets — a couple of panellists opined that they do not think that having blockchains in PPP will be too far off (music to my ears!)

· Increasing efficiency — e.g. present procurement processes which involve an extraordinary amount of paper work and manual chores could do well by leveraging technology. Using data to design, implement and monitor projects

· Using Big Data to figure out the needs (especially private investors) and understand where the gaps are

· To be a 21st century development bank, one has to rely on technology and innovation. Question is how to use them, how to connect ideas with infrastructure and needs etc.

A panelist used the term “Infratech” which in my opinion captures the essence as well as reflects very well the need of the day.

Sounds exciting, right? So with your interest piqued and curious to know more, stay tuned and keep a look out for my 2nd post ……..

Originally published at medium.com on October 24, 2018.