Big projects flourish across continent

Johannesburg – The development of sustainable urban infrastructure is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st Century.  As such, KPMG’s Global Infrastructure Practice announced that six  African infrastructure projects are included in the 100 most innovative and inspiring urban infrastructure projects in the world.
The six projects were the BRICS Cable Project in South Africa and Mauritius, the Djibouti Railway in Ethiopia, the Lagos Metro Blue Line in Nigeria, the Durban Waste to Energy Project in South Africa, the Queen Mamohato Memorial Hospital in Lesotho and the O3b Networks project being rolled out across the whole continent.
Profiles of all six projects are now featured in the much-anticipated second edition of the Infrastructure 100: World Cities Edition, which was recently released at the World Cities Summit in Singapore.  This edition provides insight into the infrastructure projects that make great cities, with a particular focus on the innovations that make them ‘Cities of the Future’ – places where people want to live and do business.
“This is a very proud achievement for the African continent,” says DeBuys Scott, Director, Global Infrastructure and Projects Group at KPMG in South Africa. “These projects show that Africa’s time truly has come, and that many of the challenges investors have traditionally associated with the continent are being dealt with.”
Africa’s projects shone in several categories. The BRICS Cable Project, which was also named the overall most innovative project in the Communications Infrastructure category, is a hugely ambitious initiative designed to boost international communication between cities and global access to high-speed internet. As the acronym suggests, this initiative aims to connect the BRICS markets with a 34,000 km, two-fibre pair submarine cable, thus removing BRICS countries’ reliance on telecommunications hubs in the US and Europe.