Welcome

Opening and welcome presention

Keynote Speech: "What does Africa need in real investment in order to realise the potential in the next 20 years"

The Keynote Speech will focus on the infrastructure needs and the educational needs required in order to achieve the various targeted growth.

Panel Discussion "Key Challenges of African Ports"

Panel discussion with live Q&A afterwards.

Networking Break

• Visit the Competitive Virtual Exhibition
• Browse the list of participants
• Exchange virtual business cards with other participants
• Chat with other participants

Moderation

Moderation of the technical presentations by Dr. Martin Schramm with live Q&A.

Private Participation in Ports - Background and Experiences

Being traffic nodes of strategic importance – and as such system relevant – and key drivers of economic and social development, while at the same time requiring high investments, historically most ports were in the public domain. Especially in Africa, ports have been in majority fully owned, financed, and developed by governments, often together with national railways, and also the staff have usually been public employees. In the late 1980’s, private sector participation in ports started particularly in southern Europe, South America, Africa, and South Asia. The reasons were mainly growing globalisation and containerisation together with tighter public budgets. At the same time, expectations regarding public private partnerships have always been high, sometimes too high, especially when it comes to the most important point of risk sharing.

Besides giving a short general background of private sector engagement in ports, the presentation will focus on the numerous aspects to be considered when a private investor is going to take over a public terminal. This will be shown by the example of the container terminal of Port Sudan, where HPC has been involved for more than ten years on behalf of the port authority, first as on site supporter of the operations management, than in the preparation of business plans for the complete port, the selection process and supervision of a private management contractor, and finally in the then following concession process until contract signature.