The money is there. The projects aren't.

Start with the number everyone quotes: the African Development Bank puts the continent's infrastructure financing gap at more than 100 billion dollars a year. It gets recited as evidence of scarcity, as if the world were short of money and Africa short-changed. That framing is comfortable and mostly wrong. Global capital is abundant and restless, sovereign wealth and pension funds are openly starved of long-dated real assets, and development banks spend their days looking for somewhere sound to lend. The shortage isn't dollars. It's the thing dollars can safely land on.

The tell is in the drop-off. Fewer than one in ten planned infrastructure projects in Africa reach financial close, on the AfDB's own reckoning. McKinsey, studying the same paradox, found that roughly four in five projects fall over at the feasibility and business-plan stage — long before a financier ever says no. Projects don't mostly die for lack of a lender at the end; they die for lack of preparation at the start. A concept without a completed feasibility study, secured land, legal clarity and a defined revenue line isn't an underfunded project. It's not yet a project at all.

This missing step has an unglamorous name — project preparation — and it is structurally underfunded for a reason worth understanding. Preparation is expensive, slow and risky: a serious feasibility study runs anywhere from tens of thousands to half a million dollars, and it might conclude that the project shouldn't be built. No politician wants to spend real money on a study that kills a ribbon-cutting, and no private developer wants to shoulder early-stage costs on a deal that may never close. So the work that determines whether a project ever becomes bankable is exactly the work no one wants to pay for. That is the missing middle, and it is where the pipeline empties out.

The agencies that have taken preparation seriously show what it's worth. The NEPAD Infrastructure Project Preparation Facility, hosted at the AfDB, approved 106 grants worth about 115 million dollars between 2004 and 2022 — and that early-stage money helped unlock roughly 11 billion dollars in downstream investment financing. Read that ratio again: preparation grants leveraged their own value close to a hundredfold, because a dollar spent making a project investable pulls in the far larger sums that only ever move once the risk is legible. Amadou Hott, Senegal's former economy minister, has argued the continent needs to multiply its project-preparation effort by a hundred or a hundred and fifty. Against that leverage, the arithmetic isn't hard.

Here's why this belongs in a brief for investment and trade promoters, not just infrastructure financiers. The logic generalises straight to the promotion desk. An agency's real product was never the tax holiday or the glossy sector brochure — it's a pipeline of prepared propositions an investor can actually underwrite. Serviced land with clear title, a mapped permitting path, a defined offtake or anchor tenant, a credible sponsor: that package is to an FDI project what a feasibility study is to a power plant. It is the same craft at a different scale, and the agencies that win deals in a tight year are the ones that show up with the homework already done rather than an invitation to start it.

None of this is a reason to stop chasing capital; it's a reason to change what you offer it. Government's proper role in the preparation phase is to absorb the early-stage risk private money won't touch — fund the studies, secure the land, resolve the legal ambiguity, stand behind the revenue model — so that when the deal reaches market it is boring in the best sense: legible, de-risked, ready. That is the unfashionable part of the job, and it is the part that decides whether the hundred-billion-dollar gap is a financing story or a preparation one. It has mostly been the second all along.