Energy, infrastructure to highlight Kenya's Ticad VI conference

Kenya will have a chance to showcase her progress in energy and infrastructure in an upcoming international economic conference to be held in August.
The Japan organised Tokyo International Conference on African Development (Ticad) has already adopted declarations on these areas from the just concluded G7 Summit to be the main focus of the conference.

"All outcome of G7 Summit are to be used on Ticad meeting that seeks to make African nations achieve their development agenda in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs)," said Yasuhisa Kawamura Japan's official of Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
According to the declaration, the seven powerful nations led by Japan vowed to mobilise resources to increase investment to do away with infrastructure with higher lifecycle costs, less durability, inequitable distributive effects and vulnerability to environment.

"The global demand and supply gap of infrastructure investment is a serious bottle neck to the current growth including job creation and development challenges the world faces," read the declaration.
This will be the first time Ticad will be held in African soil with Kenya as the host.
Some of the projects that Kenya seeks to showcase sponsored by the Japan government are the Mombasa Port expansion and the ongoing Olkaria Geothermal power projects.
Japan International Corporation Agency (Jica) noted that Kenya should use this conference to strengthen its policies and framework on Public Private Partnership (PPP) in order for the country to benefit fully from overseas assisted projects.

"It is the responsibility of the government to strengthen the private sector in some case to even provide strong institutions and streamline financial mechanism to make it easy to receive funding," said Watanabe Daisuke, Jica Director on African Development.
Jica is responsible for the Sh22 billion expansion of Mombasa Port that will increase cargo capacity by 50 per cent and the Sh40 billion Olkaria v power project whose ground breaking is expected before Ticad.
Daisuke said the conference will also be used to increase avenues of good investment ventures in the country especially in the energy sector.

"Kenya has a lot of potential just like Japan but we are disadvantaged by lack of space. We are willing to dispense this knowledge to rectify the mismatch between supply and demand that is currently Kenya's challenge," said Daisuke.
Currently, Kenya is one position ahead of Japan (eight) globally in geothermal energy.