Important issues around integrity, quality, sustainability and the leadership to embed these on construction projects were given a thorough airing on the second day of the FIDIC Global Infrastructure Conference 2025 in Cape Town, South Africa on 23 September.
Opening the day’s deliberations, Manish Kothari, president and CEO of Sheladia Associates, cited a new report by insurance company Munich Re, which said that natural disasters worldwide have cost $131bn during the first half of 2025. “This is up from $79 billion (adjusted for inflation) for the first half year average over last 30 years. “Fifty-year floods” are now occurring within a decade, so engineers must rethink what resilience requires, ensuring our solutions are both high quality and sustainable,” Kothari said.
In the day’s opening session, Delivering infrastructure with integrity, quality and sustainability - leading by example to deliver a better society, panellists debated what the industry needed to do to be best placed to do that and the key role of integrity. “Integrity builds trust and ensures lasting results. Corruption, however, continues to drain our profession, as it has since Roman times. Cicero’s Senate speech of 64 BC warned against public works being treated as enrichment rather than civic duty. Sadly, the challenge remains,” said Kothari.
Speaking to delegates, Jonathan Morris, director for programme advisory at Turner & Townsend said that “integrity comes on top” and should be what drives construction professionals as leaders and permeate everything that they do. “We all have a duty to influence the people we work with and to lead. But to lead, we also need to listen and the leaders who have impressed me all have the humility to listen,” Morris said.
Rajiv Lall, chair of the board at CoST, The Infrastructure Transparency Initiative, said that integrity was critical to ensure a better business environment, but this hinges on building a culture of trust between the private sector and governments and Lall discussed the ways how this can be achieved. Alaleh Motamedi, head of procurement at the European Investment Bank (EIB), talked about the progress that EIB has made in reforming its processes. She said that a key ingredient to that reform process was the engineering community. “The more we think about it, in a world of climate change, we need to work closely with engineers to design projects of quality,” she said. “It is clear that a better relationship with engineers is needed to improve innovation and engender a quality approach,” said Alaleh.
Clarissa Rizzo, business unit head for professional Risks at Aon South Africa, made the appoint that none of the lofty ambitions outlined above is possible without an element of risk and how specialist insurance is a critical vehicle in order to produce deliverables. “The transferring of risk from one carrier to another is a simple concept and so partnering with specialists who understand liability attached to engineering, helps to bring it all together to protect the various risks associated with complex projects,” she said.
