Empirical Study On The Risk Assessment Of Sino African International Construction Projects

Recently, the amount of trade between China and Africa has continuously increased. In2012, the total amount of economic transaction between China and Africa was estimated at USD198.5billion and this number is estimated to reach USD385billion by2015. If nowadays, China is the most important economic partner for African continent (in front of France and the USA), Sino-African relations has various issues. Chinese companies especially construction related one are encountering many project management issues that could become, if nothing is done, a serious threat to their future expansion in Africa’s construction market.One of the most encountered problems during Sino-African construction projects is the risk management issues which are not seriously take in account by the Chinese companies. In this research, investigations and interviews has been carried on many different Sino-African construction projects to understand the main sources of the risks encountered. The research seeks to address the gap in knowledge as to what are the main risks and risk sources for Sino-African International Construction Projects and what are the actual techniques and methods used by the involved parties. It focuses on understanding the lack of these methods and what solutions can be adopted.The foundation of this research is drawn from the analysis of the data acquired from the several investigations. This empirical research identifies risks and risk sources at every stage of the projects and classifies the main sources according to their severity and probability of occurrence. AHP technique is used to classify the identified main risks and sources and assess their probability of occurrence while DST is associated to assess their severity in order to reduce important scope of work increase, cost overrun and big schedule delays causing failure of projects delivery. The research results indicated that the lack of site and environment investigation in the pre-construction stage as well as organizational cultural differences is one of the most important risk sources during SA-ICPs. The implementation of different frameworks for managing the risks and the culture management approach of solution proposed in this thesis are the first steps in this new field of research. These approaches and frameworks are applied to two different case studies to evaluate their effectiveness and effectiveness in assessing SA-ICPs related risks at earlier stages of projects.This research improves the SA-ICPs understanding from the Chinese contractors and the local clients (governments) and helps the different parties in assessing different involved risks as well as planning actions to manage them.