Ask any development finance officer to name the biggest constraint on African infrastructure investment, and "bankable projects" will surface before "available capital" almost every time. The distinction is easy to state and consistently underestimated.
A bankable project is not simply a good idea with a business case attached. It is a proposition that has survived legal, technical, environmental and commercial due diligence to the standard a lending committee (not a development agency) requires before releasing capital. Most projects that stall do so not because the underlying infrastructure lacks merit, but because that standard was never reached.
Where Structuring Fails
Three failure points recur with striking consistency. Land and permitting risk is frequently underestimated at feasibility stage, resurfacing as a fatal delay during construction. Offtake agreements are drafted to satisfy a government counterparty's political timeline rather than a lender's credit requirements. And environmental and social impact assessments are treated as a compliance formality rather than a genuine risk-identification exercise, meaning issues that should have been resolved at year one appear, expensively, at year three.
Each of these is solvable. None is solved by more capital being made available. They require structuring discipline applied before a project is presented to any financier.
A Framework for Early De-Risking
We apply four tests before a project leaves origination. Is the offtake or revenue mechanism credit-worthy on its own terms, independent of political goodwill? Is land tenure and permitting sequenced ahead of, not parallel to, financial structuring? Have environmental and social risks been identified early enough that mitigation is a design choice rather than a retrofit? And is the sponsor's balance sheet, or the project's own cash flows, sufficient to absorb the risks that structuring cannot eliminate?
Projects that pass all four tests close markedly faster: in our experience, twelve to eighteen months faster than comparable transactions that reach financiers with these questions still open.
The Cost of Skipping the Sequence
The temptation to compress structuring timelines is understandable: political mandates and donor funding cycles rarely align with the pace good structuring requires. But every project we have seen fail after reaching financiers failed for a reason that should have been caught during origination. The bankability gap is not a financing problem wearing a structuring disguise. It is a structuring problem, and it responds to structuring discipline.