CLUSTERING INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS FOR OPTIMAL OPPORTUNITY VALUE: EXAMPLES FROM RURAL KWAZULU-NATAL

This paper reports on recent work by the SABITA Infrastructure Development Assessment Project (SIDAP) in prioritizing infrastructure> plans in north-eastern KwaZulu-Natal (uMkhanyakude District). Progress in implementing the Infrastructure Development Plan (IDP) process in that district, as in much of rural SA, had stalled due to capacity constraints at the regional and municipal levels that had impeded meaningful ranking of project ideas against objective criteria. SIDAP has therefore assisted the Municipality in designing business plans for clusters of infrastructure projects that will optimize growth of the regional asset base on Rand invested, by means of cross-enhancement of value amongst the projects within each cluster. (In economic parlance, clusters are designed so as to maximize the value of multipliers.) These business plans will form the basis of revised IDPs, which are in turn the basic inputs to the funding of infrastructure projects (including new and upgraded roads). In this presentation, we will describe the business plans, with special emphasis on their roads components. We will indicate the ways in which they capitalize on multipliers by comparing them with other suggested ideas that were not judged to be initial priorities. This approach to prioritization represents a preliminary exercise in the development of a planned Opportunity Value Assessment (OVA) instrument for general use in South African infrastructure development planning. 1