Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) has estimated the country's total funding gap for infrastructure projects at R150-billion over the year and CEO Paul Baloyi believes that up to half of that could be secured by "properly leveraging" SA's development finance institutions (DFIs).

Speaking at the Infrastructure Project Finance Conference in Johannesburg, on Tuesday, he said that there was a growing funding gap to finance the country's infrastructure spend, which was estimated to be at about R787-billion over the next three years.

"The DFI system could play a significant role by contributing up to probably 50% of that if properly leveraged and that is not impossible to do," commented Baloyi.

South Africa was not financially poor and could "sail through the economic crisis" if there was better coordination of government resources and better leveraging of what government actually had, he noted.

For the country to secure financing, it would have to match the opportunities and needs of the country with the agendas and objectives of funders, he noted, adding that all financiers had different motives, funding instruments and terms and conditions to providing finance.

"In Africa, the complexities of the global funding and investment environment interfaces with multifaceted needs and integrated development initiatives, the intricacies of crossborder and large projects and, inadequate information on opportunities," he stated.

If better information on available, or potential, opportunities could be gathered and more coordination and targeting of funding was done, this would allow the continent to benefit, he added.

Africa had to ensure that the roles and opportunities for both the public and private sectors were identified and that public sector interventions were synchronised to support, enable or complement private sector investment.

Further, the public and private sectors had to ensure that there was a flow of bankable projects, which would improve project preparation and coordination, especially on large projects.

Baloyi noted that the environment for business had to be continuously improved to ensure the simplification of regulations and legal requirements and reduce bureaucracy.

It was also important for African countries to promote access to long-term foreign capital markets, as well as developing local capital markets.

Meanwhile, Baloyi noted that plenty of potential growth opportunities would be available to the continent in the aftermath of the global economic crisis.

The crisis would likely hasten adjustment alignment to new economic realities across the world, he said, adding that opportunities for the continent would depend on the character of the world when it emerged from the crisis.

The developing economies of the East, such as China and India, were likely to resume economic growth first, but would require natural resources that it did not have.

These "commodity hungry" countries would draw resource-rich, commodity-exporting countries, such as those in Africa, into the global economic recovery at an early stage, said Baloyi.