Via Bloomberg, a look at Africa’s infrastructure challenges and opportunities:

Africa will need some innovative thinking to fill a yawning infrastructure gap.

That’s the message from delegates at this week’s inaugural Africa edition of the Bloomberg New Economy Gateway conference.

By some estimates, the continent requires as much as $170 billion a year to build roads, ports, power plants and water infrastructure.

Yet the challenge of securing financing saw investments in public works plunge by half in the first six months of 2022 compared with a year before. In contrast, private funding to similar projects in India and China almost doubled.

The key to attract funding, speakers at the forum in Morocco say, is to come up with new ideas for financing, predictable regulatory regimes and investable projects.

Why? Because investors just want to “de-risk, de-risk, de-risk,” said Caroline Eboumbou, chief executive officer of All On, which promotes off-grid access to electricity in Nigeria.

There are some success stories.

Société Générale des Travaux du Maroc, one of Morocco’s largest construction firms, said a special project bond — effectively bridge finance — in which local institutions invested has helped them accelerate a water pipeline in the North African nation.

The company expects to complete the 40-mile conduit by August (in just eight months). It will bring water from north of the capital, Rabat, to the water-scare Bouregreg basin.

“The real word in Morocco is fast-track,” said Hamza Kabbaj, SGTM’s director general. “Financing by itself isn’t a problem.”

It’s the lack of coordination and trust between government, financiers, construction companies and other stakeholders that leads to failure of a project, he said.

Thinking out of the box may well be what unlocks Africa’s potential, and gets projects through layers of bureaucracy.

That’s an approach governments on the continent struggling to bring energy, power and goods to its residents could learn from, said Claudine Uwera, Rwanda’s minister for economic planning.