«Addressing inefficiencies and closing the funding gap for infrastructure are critical to Africa’s economic future. However, without dependable statistics on the infrastructure sectors it is difficult for policy makers to determine infrastructure priorities, track progress on infrastructure development, benchmark performance against peers, and evaluate the impact of past investments. The need for comprehensive, comparable and reliable information on infrastructure is widely recognized. For the sustainability of infrastructure databases in Africa, national statistical offices (NSOs) are expected to mainstream the collection and compilation of infrastructure statistics into their routine statistical data gathering and compilation activities over time, so that countries have time series data on infrastructure indicators to help monitor and evaluate key policy challenges. It is to this end that this Handbook on Infrastructure Statistics has been developed to provide a rigorous and consistent basis for the measurement of infrastructure trends in Africa and to ensure the harmonization and standardization of data collection methodologies to allow for benchmarking against regional, sub-regional, and country-level indicators and for further analysis.The Handbook is directed to four main audiences: Data providers at source (regulators, line ministers, utilities, operators, etc.); Data collectors (analysts and consultants in the field); Data managers (at the National Statistical Offices and other organizations) in charge of consolidating and disseminating infrastructure statistics); and Data users (sector specialists and specialized agencies.»
