The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
The Philippines recently took part in the global launching of the International Infrastructure Support System (IISS), a project preparation platform developed by the Sustainable Infrastructure Foundation (SIF) in collaboration with the Asian Development Bank.
The IISS is a new online cloud-based project development tool for project sponsors to attract and increase investment in infrastructure. The Center sees this as a useful marketing tool to promote the Philippine PPP program in the global market and ensure greater participation in the country’s PPP projects.
IISS utilizes an online IT platform targeted specifically for project preparation, collaboration and information sharing. It offers different templates for government agencies and private entities to help improve the quality and transparency of projects prepared ensuring a wider range of public, PPP and private funding options.
As one of the pilot countries to use the IISS platform, the Philippines included the North-South Rail project (NSRP) as one of the first projects to use the IISS platform. The NSRP is currently undergoing a competitive bidding process. The USD 3.7-B rail project is one of several rail projects being undertaken by the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) under a public-private partnership scheme.
Five companies, namely San Miguel Holdings Corporation, Metro Pacific Investment Corporation, AC Infrastructure Holdings Corporation, Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services Transport Networks Limited and Fluor Daniel Pacific Inc., a subsidiary of Fluor Corporation are set to submit their pre-qualification documents for the NSRP on March 31, 2016, the deadline for submission.
The PPP Center’s participation to the IISS gives it the exposure to a wider range of would be investors for its PPP projects.
The Center’s involvement on the IISS complements the homegrown Virtual Data Room (VDR) that is being used by Implementing Agencies and investors as the repository of PPP project documents during the bidding process. The VDR is part of the Center’s knowledge management (KM) portal which acts as a strategic tool in centralizing all PPP related documents by storing information and transforming into useful knowledge products.