SIF has been hosting a series of webinars along with its partners United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment (UNPRI) and Long Term Infrastructure Investors Association (LTIIA) to explore SOURCE’s role in improving the project preparation process and propelling the delivery of well-structured and sustainable projects to the community of long term investors.
On 22 January 2018, a webinar on Improving infrastructure project preparation and access to critical data was co-hosted by UNPRI and attended by over 60 participants. The webinar, moderated by Archie Beeching, Head of Real Assets, UNPRI, focused on the opportunities that the platform offers to long-term investors to facilitate their involvement in the development of infrastructure and the integration of their Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) procedures. Rana Ghorayeb, Vice President and Head of Infrastructure Transactions, Europe and the Americas, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), highlighted the following key benefit of the platform:
“Time spent ciphering through information is not the right use of my team nor our time. SOURCE addresses this, because it facilitates standardization through its templates. We therefore spend time analyzing the project rather than gathering information. Time is money for us.” Rana Ghorayeb
Laurence Carter, Senior Director, Public-Private Partnerships, World Bank, sees SOURCE as a way to help educate government officials on the key elements of project preparation to bring the project to the market.
On February 5th and 6th, SIF and LTIIA hosted two global webinars, gathering more than 100 participants. The webinars focused on SOURCE as a tool to unlock greater participation of private capital in the infrastructure financing. A riveting discussion was cantered around how SOURCE can support the development of infrastructure as an asset class through: developing global standards for project preparation, standardising risks, promoting quality of infrastructure investment and addressing data gaps on infrastructure performance projects.
Trevor Lewis from Asian Development Bank stated that SOURCE is a mature approach to deal with the scale issue. Paola Sherina, from the Department of Finance, Philippines expressed that SOURCE will help the Philippines not only for the procurement and management of their infrastructure program but also to introduce transparency as part of the Philippines’ ‘golden age of infrastructure’ campaign.
Catherine Workman from Pinsent Mason believes that the better prepared the project, the more likely it is to be delivered and be capable of being funded/financed and receive invested, and SOURCE can aid this process.
A representative from Peru’s Ministry of Finance, Alvaro Valencia, expressed that MOF strongly believes that a platform like SOURCE will benefit the public sector by improving project readiness as well as communication among all the stakeholders involved in the project.
Follow SIF news and @SIFSOURCE on twitter and Facebook, for information on our forthcoming webinars, in a few weeks.