Effects of Infrastructure Project Cost Overruns and Schedule Delays in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper provides conceptual insights on the economic impact of project cost overruns and schedule delays on infrastructure procurement in developing countries with weak institutions such as those in Sub-Saharan Africa. Project cost overruns and schedule delays are a major and widespread problem in infrastructure procurement the world over that has received a lot of attention in the recent past. However, a critical review of the literature reveals that extant studies on project overruns are heavily skewed towards causative factors, with little or no attention to the effects it has on the economy as a whole. The paucity of studies on the effects of project cost overruns and schedule delays further reinforces the imperative to reacquaint policymakers and infrastructure developers, as well as project financiers with the gravity and import of the problem for infrastructural development in particular and the wider economy in general. The study undertakes an exploratory approach drawing from a wide range of theoretical and empirical literature obtained from policy documents, study reports and peer-reviewed articles. The findings shows that cost overrun and schedule delay in infrastructure procurement can have a damaging economic effect ranging from productive inefficiency of scarce resources, further delays, contractual disputes, claims and litigation to project failure and total abandonment. The study recommends project management capacity-building for infrastructure developers, project managers as well as a number of innovative control mechanisms such as reference class forecasting, public-private partnership and computer-aided cost estimating tools including artificial neural networks, data mining, building information modelling as well as fuzzy neural inference model, genetic algorithms, and stochastic simulation to curb the menace of the phenomenon