2022 Africa and Middle East Regional Meeting

This session aims at assessing the potential of beneficial ownership to help ending the use of anonymous companies linked to corruption and mismanagement in infrastructure procurement.

This session will bring together stakeholders from Infrastructure, Extractives and Beneficial Ownership to share ideas and highlighting the value of joint efforts to draft a journey in opening data and shaping reforms and explore the potential to scale efforts beyond procuring public infrastructure into Public Private Partnerships.

EITI is supporting reforms to disclose the ownership of extractive companies and CoST is aiming to implement a similar approach, learning from its sister initiative.

We have also invited the Government of Ghana to share lessons from their application of Beneficial Ownership Disclosure and CoST Malawi on what beneficial ownership means for SMEs.

Presentations will be followed by breakout discussions with participants to brainstorming ways to tackle challenges to unlock benefits of ownership data in the public infrastructure sector and beyond.

The outcome of this session is an inspired group of participants committed to collective action to implement beneficial ownership connected to infrastructure transparency. CoST will work with its partners to turn some of the ideas into guidance on beneficial ownership for infrastructure.

Each speaker will be given 6-7 minutes to share their approach and experience of beneficial ownership and the lesson that may be relevant to infrastructure. Followed by 10 minute Q&A

Small group breakout discussion will then follow for 25 minutes followed by a 15 minute plenary where a rapporteur will briefly share the conclusions of each table. Each rapporteur will be asked to take a brief note of the discussion and share it with the session organisers.