Dualities by design : The Global Race to Build Africa's Infrastructure

As the backbone of modern society, infrastructure is a basic enabler of socioeconomic development. But as Africa´s population grows rapidly, the gap between infrastructure supply and demand is widening worryingly. Building on an extensive collection of empirical studies about global efforts to build Africa´s infrastructure, the book advances the argument that organizations tackling this grand societal chalenge face a duality - institutional building and capital allocation are both desirable objectives, but it is hard to design organizations to pursue both because the underlying atributes are incompatible. Hence, organizations enabled by traditional intermediaries such as the World Bank focus on institutional building first, capital allocation second. Organizations enabled by emergent intermediaries associated to China´s economic rise focus on capital allocation first, institutional building second. As organizations choose gains from focus on either pole of the duality to conform to donor pressures, the evidence shows that they invariably struggle to achieve the ultimate goal - enable Africa´s socio economic development - even if for different reasons. The book concludes with a call for a search towards more ambidexterous forms of organizing.

Editors Nuno Gil, Anne Stafford, Inocent Musonda.

Forthcoming by Cambridge University Press.