CMCs and DCIs

Corridor Management Committees and Development Corridor Initiatives (also known as Spatial Development Initiatives - SDIs)

Corridor Management Committees have been formed by public and private entities to improve performance of transport routes by

  • Transport infrastructure investments
  • Facilitation measures to decrease time and cost on routes
  • Marketing corridor routes

Development Corridor Initiatives have been initiated to encourage economic development along transport corridors by

  • Integrated infrastructure investment
  • Anchor economic project identification, packaging, and investor mobilisation
  • Promotion and utilisation of upstream and downstream linkages, including SME development

CMC Lessons Learned:

  • To be successful, corridor interventions need strong market demand
  • Leadership must be competent, professional and resourced
  • CMCs need a clear agenda and project preparation experience
  • They can facilitate project identification
  • CMCs can play a major role in harmonization and streamlining documents and procedures
  • Marketing and business development disseminate information on improvements and promote route use
  • Some means of performance monitoring must be identified and implemented

Development Corridors (SDI) Lessons Learned

  • Socio-economic context
    • Socio-political stability
    • Focus on areas of inherent, but under-utilised, potential
  • Development planning and programming
    • Identification of anchor/lead investment projects
    • Marketing and investor mobilisation
    • Integrated set of viable economic and infrastructure projects
    • Projects must be properly packaged
    • Projects must be appropriately marketed
      • Consistent development strategy
      • Reactive and proactive marketing
      • Investment conferences have limited success
    • Transparent bidding processes
    • Role of lead investors
  • Institutional development and capacity building
    • Political commitment
    • Need for public and private sector involvement
    • Multi-year financial and technical support
    • Development of own technical capacity
  • Legal and regulatory reform
    • DCs do not necessarily require 'regional' legal and regulatory reform - bi or tri-lateral agreements can be used.
    • Private sector investment decisions are primarily determined by financial viability, political stability, and policy clarity.
  • Development impact
    • Substantial impact in terms of investment mobilised, employment creation, enterprise establishment, trade flows, efficiency gains, economic growth, etc.

CMC and DCI support interventions are complementary:

  • CMC initiatives are ongoing and focused on
    • Transport and trade facilitation, infrastructure upgrading, improving operational efficiencies; marketing of improvements
    • Institutional arrangements = public/private partnership
  • DCIs (SDI) initiatives are focused on
    • Identifying, packaging and marketing integrated infrastructure and economic investment projects
    • Identifying and implementing regulatory reform priorities
    • Institutional arrangements = public/private partnership, but may include a more diverse range of stakeholders

Adding a DCI unit to a CMC:

  • Confirm that there is a convincing business case
  • Build on existing CMC capacity wherever possible
  • Ensure an inclusive and participatory approach to the transformation process
  • Be sure to maintain existing performance and development momentum and efficiency gains of the transport corridor