The latest milestone of Global Infrastructure Hub’s (GI Hub) Brazil Country Engagement Program has been completed with a gathering of infrastructure leaders from Brazil for an inception workshop on the SOURCE platform.
Led by the GI Hub in partnership with the Sustainable Infrastructure Foundation and the Inter-American Development Bank, the workshop covered how the integration of SOURCE, which is created and funded by Multilateral Development Banks, could strengthen the capacity of Brazilian project developers by providing project preparation support, infrastructure intelligence and a pipeline of well-prepared projects.
Representatives from several agencies of Brazil’s Ministry of Economy, the Planning and Logistics Company, the Brazilian Development Bank and Caixa were in attendance.
Following the workshop, SOURCE will conduct a needs assessment to review existing IT tools and identify gaps and specific needs for potential future integration for these agencies.
Commenting on the meeting, GI Hub Director of Practical Tools and Knowledge, Maud De Vautibault, said: “Our Country Engagement Program has been very focused on enhancing infrastructure capabilities of practitioners and policy makers within the Brazilian Government as well as facilitating greater private sector participation through better structured projects, and SOURCE could potentially amplify these efforts.”
The SOURCE platform can provide a comprehensive map of aspects to consider for developing quality infrastructure, including governance, technical, economic, legal, financial, environmental and social issues determined from internationally recognised knowledge products including GI Hub’s PPP Risk Allocation Tool. In addition to using sector-specific questions covering all the stages of the project cycle, attendees were informed about how it allows the definition of specific targets to fulfil the Sustainable Development Goals and global initiatives such as the Paris Agreement.
Chief Operating Officer at Sustainable Infrastructure Foundation, Pierre Sarat, noted the workshop focused on identifying how SOURCE could best support the Brazilian government in the preparation of sustainable infrastructure: “The key factor for the successful implementation of the platform in Brazil will be to leverage existing processes, methodologies and tools, to adapt the solution to the government’s needs and requirements” he said.
Having delivered the port privatisation market sounding report, and a series of targeted workshops, the remaining streams of work under GI Hub’s Country Engagement Program are the provision of two initiatives: a benchmarking study on private long-term finance for infrastructure, and a study on leading practices for allocating and mitigating foreign currency risks, which are due for delivery in early 2021.
Workshop participants discuss project preparation