A Railway Concessioning Toolkit. Application to African Networks

The Toolkit presented here (also available in French as the Guide de mise en concession ferroviaire) is intended to provide African countries, in summary form, with an overview of the experience to date with railway concessioning in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Guide refrains from defining ‘the’ model concession arrangement to be applied in every circumstance; no such model exists, and each individual situation calls for individualised solutions. But the wealth of accumulated experience should at least make it possible to avoid repetition of some of the mistakes that the pioneers with concession operations did indeed make in the course of the process, the complexity of which could hardly be underestimated. The aim of the guide is to describe the method and all the instruments of value for concessioning a railway.
The Toolkit comprises the following six parts:
(1) Characterics of the railway concessions studied;
(2) A progress report on the reforms initiated in Sub-Saharan Africa and a summary of the primary lessons learned from experience with concessioning operations already completed or under way;
(3) An aide-mémoire on the tasks to be carried out in order to maximize the chances for a successful concessioning;
(4) Analysis of the provisions it is desirable to incorporate into a concession agreement;
(5) Analysis of the selection procedures; and
(6) Texts of standard documents that are likely to be used in the context of a concessioning process.