Infrastructure symposium seeks to close SA’s R1 trillion funding gap

South Africa has an infrastructure gap of more than R1 trillion, which it needs to fund major infrastructure projects in the country.

Infrastructure South Africa revealed this at this year’s Sustainable Infrastructure Development Symposium of South Africa .

The government hopes the symposium will help close that gap, as it meets with investors and industry experts in Cape Town this week.

Since its inception in 2020, the symposium has played a pivotal role in mobilising funding, strengthening national infrastructure, and addressing systemic delivery challenges.

Head of Infrastructure SA, Mameetse Masemola, explaining why further funding is needed, says, “So, over and above the R1.1trillion that the Minister of Finance has made available for capital projects, we must still raise R1.6 trillion for all these other government mega infrastructure investments or projects.

And so we need to be able to work very hard on, like the minister has said, on preparing and packaging these projects so that they can unlock additional fiscal allocations as well as be able to attract private sector financing.” This year’s Sustainable Infrastructure Development Symposium of South Africa is being held over three days in Cape Town this week.

The symposium brings together investors, industry experts, and government leaders from the continent to advance international partnerships and expand investment opportunities.

Opening the symposium, Minister of Public Works and Infrastructure, Dean Macpherson, said the theme this year is Shaping the Future of Municipal Infrastructure.

“We understand that there are problems there in terms of capacity capability, but also funding and financing, and so, unless we are going to do something about it, it’s going to be very difficult to resolve these issues.

So, we are making good progress on that on the national front, on the big catalytic projects.

But it’s how do we deal with these other projects, secondary projects, in municipalities, that’s around water, electricity distribution, road networks, waste,” he elaborated.

SIDSSA | Spotlight on municipalities, water & electricity distribution: Dean Macpherson