Africa Urban Sanitation Investment Initiative will achieve its objective to meet the urban sanitation challenge through providing support to Regional Member Countries in creating an enabling and conducive environment for urban sanitation. It will promote an integrated and service-oriented approach with a wide array of sanitation options that are tailored to cities and people, including centralized and decentralized systems, onsite sanitation, faecal-sludge systems and simplified sewer systems.
In addition, AUSII will use its financial means to mobilise investments from private and public sources to improve the development of the urban sanitation sector in Africa.
AUSII aims to deploy three (3) instruments:
Grants for upstream technical assistance, project preparation, capacity building and preparation of financial instruments:
- Early market development, such as creating awareness and regulatory reforms
- Project planning, such as diagnostic studies and project pipeline development
- Capacity building, such as institutional capacity development, market capacity building and financial capacity building.
- Implementation support, such as project pilots and scaling innovative business models.
Technical assistance
- Covering transaction support for structuring and establishing PPPs, investment promotion for downstream activities, pump-priming (early-stage project implementation financed through Results-Based Finance programs and/or soft loans for innovative SMEs).
Investment activities
- Covering risk capital, blended finance and guarantees, generating investment project portfolio and on-lending agreements with local financial institutions.
- AUSII is initiating diagnostic studies among Regional Member Countries in phases that will shape the its intervention strategy at the country level, and the financial instruments that are most appropriate to advance the sanitation agenda in each of the countries.