Applications call for West Africa Coastal Areas Management Program.

The World Bank Group is launching a Call for Innovation under the West Africa Coastal Areas Management Program (WACA). More specifically, the call is part of the ongoing WACA Resilience Investment Project (WACA ResIP), a multi-country regional project that aims to support present assets and strengthen the resilience of coastal communities for Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Mauritania, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, and Togo. These six countries, covering approximately 2,200 km of coastline, have particularly vulnerable coastal areas due to erosion, flooding, and pollution, but they also have a will to properly address the unwanted consequences. The WACA Program supported these countries to develop a multi-sectoral investment planning processes, culminating in WACA Multi-Sector Investment Plans (MSPs) available on the country pages of this website.

The Challenge 

This Call for Innovation seeks to identify innovative and feasible solutions to fight coastal erosion and flooding issues associated with the ongoing development of large commercial ports and maritime operations in West Africa, mainly for Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Mauritania, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, and Togo, but with also an outlook for the rest of the countries in West Africa. In most cases, existing ports were built with limited planning and considerations of potential exacerbation of coastal erosion. The significant threat is that this shortcoming is also occurring for designing and constructing new ports.

Scope

The scope is to identify innovations that allow to avoid, mitigate, and remediate the geomorphological and ecological impacts (i.e. coastal erosion and decline in marine ecology) associated with existing and planned commercial ports in West Africa. Proposed solutions will need to be innovative, feasible and sustainable, and may include: infrastructures to be implemented along the coast to control erosion from existing and planned new ports; infrastructures to be implemented at existing and planned new ports and lagoon systems to control water flows and sediment loads; operation and maintenance practices for existing and planned new ports; Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) business models and contracting options for existing and planned new ports.

Eligibilities 

Participants could be a single entity or a consortium made of more entities. To be eligible, an entity must be a university (public or private), a research organization (public or private), or a private enterprise (i.e. an engineering firm, a construction firm, or a consulting group). An entity can only submit one application only. Therefore, an entity that has already submitted a proposal, either alone or as part of a consortium, is not allowed to submit another proposal (either alone or as part of another consortium).

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