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