Developing Countries: Private Finance Initiative

(asked on 19th January 2018) - View Source

Question to the Department for International Development:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, how many PFI projects her Department is funding through its international development aid budget; and what those projects are.


Answered by
Alistair Burt Portrait
Alistair Burt
This question was answered on 26th January 2018

The UN estimates there is a major financing gap of around $2.5 trillion p.a. for developing countries in delivering the Sustainable Development Goals which will need to be met by the public and private sector. The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) is specific to the UK context, and used as the primary model of Public Private Partnerships in the UK. There is no internationally agreed definition of either a PFI or a PPP. However, DFID supports developing countries in many ways to mobilise private finance, including through forms of Public-Private Partnerships. This is unlikely to include UK style PFI projects. DFID’s approach mobilises much needed private investment in infrastructure and other sectors where private sector activity is limited. This includes projects financed through CDC, the World Bank Group, the regional development banks and the Private Infrastructure Development Group. In some of these investments the government of the developing country will be the end purchaser of the services. In all our work DFID has a strong emphasis on value for money.

The Public-Private Partnerships that DFID supports play an important role in providing access to services that might otherwise not exist in those countries. In the absence of this type of support, developing country governments would need to raise capital in debt markets to meet the costs of these essential investments.

[Details on the range of Public-Private Partnership projects that DFID supports can be found on the following websites: https://devtracker.dfid.gov.uk/; http://www.cdcgroup.com/; http://www.worldbank.org/; https://www.afdb.org/en/; https://www.adb.org/; https://www.aiib.org/en/index.html; https://www.iadb.org/en; http://www.caribank.org/; http://www.ebrd.com/; http://www.eib.org/; http://www.pidg.org/ and http://data.pidg.org/]

Reticulating Splines