Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Mesoamerica Integration and Development Project have launched the Infrastructure and Transport Hub to facilitate the development of infrastructure across the region.
A new platform has been launched to boost regional logistics integration and improve competitiveness through improved multimodal infrastructure project delivery. This comes as the latest step in the Mesoamerica Project’s transport, mobility and logistics agenda, led by its regional technical commission on transport.
The platform, the Infrastructure and Transport Hub (HIT), which is free for public use, is currently in its first phase. It contains data from Belize, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama and the Dominican Republic.
HIT serves as a powerful investment-planning tool, with constantly updated data and a repository of information for countries, with the aim of supporting decision-making on regional infrastructure issues. It also constitutes a knowledge base for productive sectors and citizens.
The platform consists of seven modules, providing information on regional physical infrastructure (ports, airports, logistics), road inventories, principal value chains, amounts and products mobilised and a portfolio of regional projects (both potential and in the IDB’s pipeline).
HIT also allows users to view measures adopted during the Covid-19 crisis in 2020 and to access data on the relationship between infrastructure and demographic and socioeconomic variables (poverty, education level and gender, among others).
Tomás Bermúdez, general manager of the IDB’s Central America, Haiti, Mexico, Panama and Dominican Republic Country Department, explained: “The development of HIT is part of our commitment to countries to provide effective and innovative technical support for making decisions about investing in infrastructure.”
Lidia Fromm Cea, executive director of the Mesoamerica Project, added: “The HIT platform is valuable not only for its impact on commercial activity, but also because it takes into account environmental components that are crucial for the holistic development of the region’s countries.”
