At the end of three days of closed-door meetings and to much fanfare, African Development Bank (AfDB) president Sidi Ould Tah closed the fourth Africa Investment Forum (AIF) in Rabat, Morocco, with the announcement that the event had raised $15.2bn in funding for Africa’s most significant public-private projects (PPPs).

The AIF, a subsidiary of the AfDB, was founded in 2018 with Africa’s key development and trade finance partners: South Africa’s Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA), the pan-African Afreximbank, East Africa’s Trade Development Bank, the Africa Finance Corporation, Africa50 and the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa. The organisation’s singular objective is to secure the substantial sums needed to accelerate major infrastructure investment in Africa.

AIF is the partners’ answer to three chronic problems afflicting infrastructure development in Africa: a paucity of available projects in the pipeline; that 80% of Africa’s infrastructure projects fail at the feasibility phase; and that Africa needs about $130bn-$170bn in infrastructure development per year to accelerate cross-continental growth. Since its inception, AIF has brought $32bn worth of transactions to financial close.

Tah, the thoughtful, sombre and serious Mauritanian economist and former president of the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa, replaced the flamboyant dicky-bow-wearing Nigerian Akinwumi Adesina at the AfDB. He opened and closed the conference with short, slick speeches traversing fluently English, French and Arabic.

He beat Zambian economist and World Bank candidate Samuel Maimbo to take up the post in September – apparently because he would be able to mobilise and channel Gulf funds into AfDB projects. It paid off: the presence of several Gulf investors – Saudi Exim Bank, Qatar Development Bank and the United Arab Emirates’ Islamic Reussir Fund and Equiline Fund – cements an existing trend of Gulf states taking a greater stake in Africa’s development.

A spirit of pan-Africanism

Unlike the major commercial conferences model, which provide little more than vaguely themed networking opportunities in expensive business tourism venues, the AIF’s three “market days” were structured around a set of key projects that the organisers describe as “curated”. This means their feasibility, social and environmental assessments were already completed.

Since 2018, AIF’s team of investment and development professionals have scoured the continent sourcing projects. They’ve worked with sponsors, governments and professional advisers to bring projects to an investment-ready and sufficiently advanced state to present to the world’s major commercial banks and development institutions in a series of closed-door meetings.

This year JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, Standard Bank, Standard Chartered and RMB were all prominent. So, too, were several non-African development financial institutions, including Japan International Co-operation Agency and the European Investment Bank.

A central theme of the market days was an updated pan-Africanism, with African-owned institutions showcasing African projects to global finance. This was a reversal of the post-independence model, where US, EU, UK and, lately, Chinese institutions developed and pushed projects on governments.

Embracing the private sector

Not all Africa’s 54 countries were represented. Those that were are notable for their established economic reforms, broader political stability and embrace of the private sector and of the PPP model – something that is likely to become a development differentiator.

The fact that a military coup took place in Guinea-Bissau on day two of the conference barely raised an eyebrow. However, investors in a project in Tanzania reportedly grilled the project’s sponsors on the implications of political killings that took place during October’s general elections.

Morocco’s finance minister, who hosted the event in the country’s manicured administrative capital, reiterated her government’s commitment to limiting government involvement in projects to 25%.

South Africa, which is relatively new to embracing the PPP concept, was there. Its DBSA signalled its intention to “change its name”, hinting that the bank will get involved in project financing beyond the Southern African Development Community.

Also prominent was Angola, where the ruling former liberation party, the MPLA, has abandoned the state-control model it adopted in 1974. It is accelerating both its privatisation programme and advancing PPP, and brings several projects associated with the Lobito Corridor development.

Lift-off

Of the 41 projects presented this year, 38 were “bankable”; 15 were in the energy sector and renewables, with the transport projects collectively representing the highest valued at $17bn.

Fresh from commissioning the 5,000MW hydropower Ethiopian Renaissance Dam project in September, Ethiopia has launched another mega-project. Ethiopia Airlines Group plans to build a new international airport some 65km from Addis Ababa.

EAG – which will own and run the Bishoftu International Airport – will also develop accompanying road and rail links. It plans to increase capacity to 60-million passengers, but ultimately to reach 100-million to become the main hub for travel to and from Africa. A simple drop in altitude that the 65km represents will give Ethiopian Airlines greater “lift”, and increase the range of its aircraft so it can schedule direct flights to the US and Asia.

Perhaps because many of the 2,500 delegates had to transit via Doha, Amsterdam or Paris to get to Rabat, murmurs of interest rippled from the first day. The first phase of the project secured more than half of the $8bn required in the 10 minutes after the boardroom presentation closed.

‘For Africa. By Africa’

Other major projects were from the Africa Finance Corporation, which returned to the market with the Zambia portion of the Lobito Corridor. The rail project links the Zambian Copperbelt to Angola’s Lobito port.

The DBSA sponsored seven projects, including the cross-border Lauca-Kolwezi transmission line – a 1,150-km high-voltage power line connecting Angola’s Lauca hydropower plant to the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Kolwezi mining region. It also brought a new credit guarantee initiative in which the South African government, DBSA and the AfDB plan to raise $300m for new energy-transmission projects.

Mercifully absent were the ill-prepared, rambling incoherent ministerial speeches, and bag-carrying bureaucrats clocking up their per diems – the “absent while shopping” that so often blighted investment events of yore. In their place were young professionals – often with a decade or more of development finance experience behind them – judging their success by conversion of interest in projects to financial close rather than rent-seeking.

The focus, careful choreography and polished presentation itself underpinned a sentiment of confidence felt by many. As one of the organisers said: “A good show. For Africa. By Africa.”