The Projects Are There. So Is the Capital.

–Africa’s next energy challenge is building the markets and connections that bring them together

By Omar Hefny Mahmoud*

I am writing this from Kinshasa, after several days of conversations with policymakers, investors, financial institutions and businesses, convened at the 2026 DRC Investment Forum. It has reinforced something I’ve been chewing on for a while.

Anyone working on investment in Africa knows the standard diagnosis by heart. The continent has enormous potential but needs more infrastructure. Governments need to improve the business environment. Investors need greater certainty. Above all, Africa needs more “bankable projects.” There’s truth in this, but after hearing variations of the same argument at more conferences than I can count, I’ve started to doubt we’re asking the right question.

Sitting through the investment pitches in Kinshasa, I didn’t see a shortage of projects. Some were stronger than others, but these were real businesses with real assets and real needs. A coffee producer with established export markets needed processing capacity, not a buyer. An agricultural business had already organised its farmers, mapped production and secured offtake; what it needed was capital to scale, not validation. In the energy discussions, nobody doubted demand for electricity existed. The question was how to connect producers and consumers in a market where creditworthiness and long-term offtake remain genuinely hard to pin down.

Not every project is investment-ready, of course. But reducing Africa’s investment challenge to a shortage of bankable projects misses something.

One conversation in Kinshasa stuck with me. The founder of GreenCo made a point about electricity markets that sounds simple but isn’t: you can spend a year building a bespoke guarantee structure to make one project bankable, or you can build a market where viable projects stop needing a bespoke structure every time.

Her point goes beyond a single power project. Bankability itself is not fixed. It’s manufactured, deal by deal, through guarantees, offtake structures and currency hedges built around a single transaction. The more interesting question is why that manufacturing has to start from scratch every time, when the projects and the capital both already exist.

Traditionally, when a deal doesn’t happen, the blame lands on the country (“too risky”) or the entrepreneur (“not bankable”). More often than not, that diagnosis is incomplete. The pieces that make a deal bankable usually exist somewhere in the system already. They just haven’t been connected to this project yet.

In some ways, capital in Africa faces the same problem as the continent’s electricity. The generation exists, the demand exists, but too little of what’s needed to move one to the other has been built. For power, that missing piece is a transmission line. For capital, it’s the people and platforms who can find the right project, structure it for an unfamiliar investor, and stay in the room once the introductions are made. Concretely, that can mean regional credit-enhancement facilities that pool offtaker risk across several projects at once, rather than one bespoke guarantee negotiated deal by deal, or power pools that let electricity trade across borders instead of stranding generation behind a single national buyer.

The DRC illustrates the stakes well. It produces roughly 70% of the world’s cobalt and around 15% of mined copper, yet less than a quarter of its population has access to electricity, despite sitting on close to 100,000 MW of hydropower potential, of which the Inga site alone accounts for over 40,000 MW. Barely 5% of that potential has been developed. Unlocking more of it will require more than viable generation projects; transmission, market structures and reliable demand also have to develop as part of a functioning system. Electricity constraints make it harder to process those minerals locally and keep more of their value at home, and the DRC is far from the only African country facing that gap.

Functioning energy markets matter beyond the energy sector. When investment can flow repeatedly rather than being engineered one project at a time, the result is reliable power the rest of the economy can depend on: for mineral processing, cold chains and agriculture, or manufacturing that can run a second shift. Reliable power increasingly underwrites the digital economy too. Energy policy is becoming digital policy, whether ministries have caught up to that or not.

There’s a reason I’m cautiously optimistic: the geography of capital interested in Africa is shifting. African banks and development finance institutions are financing across borders and structuring deals themselves. Gulf investors are showing real appetite for African infrastructure and energy. Türkiye has built serious commercial experience on the continent. Europe, the US and China remain important, but the field of plausible partners has widened considerably.

What surprised me most in Kinshasa wasn’t finding projects, or even finding people willing to finance them. It was everything that happens in between.

I remain a believer in convening, despite having sat through more “Africa has enormous potential” panels than I care to admit. Conferences aren’t the problem. Some of the best partnerships start because the right people end up in the same room. The problem is when the conversation ends there.

That’s the standard I want to hold our own work to. At Moharram & Partners, our new strategic partnership with the Africa GCC Council is one response to the shifting capital landscape, another channel connecting African opportunities with Gulf investors. Ahead of COP31 in Antalya, we’re building an Africa-focused Energy and Infrastructure Dialogue, bringing African policymakers and businesses into the room with capital and implementation partners. The framing has been shaped in part by conversations with NJ Ayuk earlier this year and by African Energy Week’s insistence that Africa’s energy choices serve African industrialisation, not just export volumes.

Because the work can’t end in Antalya, we’re also launching two continuing platforms: an Africa Energy Policy Lab, where policymakers and investors can work through structures like shared credit enhancement and cross-border power trading, the kind of fixes that solve a constraint once instead of re-engineering it deal by deal, and an AI Policy Lab, reflecting how tightly energy, digital infrastructure and competitiveness are now linked.

The individual pieces of Africa’s investment puzzle are often already sitting in the room together. They just don’t yet add up to a market. Building that market won’t remove risk or replace the need for better regulation and project preparation. But it can move the conversation past diagnosing the same problem for the tenth time, toward understanding exactly what stands between a viable opportunity and the capital already looking for one. Get that right, and more power starts flowing to where it’s needed.

Installed capacity matters, and for the hundreds of millions of Africans still waiting for a first connection, it matters most of all. The projects are there. The capital is there. What Africa still needs to build is the connection between them.

* Omar Hefny is Head of Sub-Saharan Africa at Moharram & Partners, where he leads the firm’s work across the region at the intersection of public policy, investment and government engagement. He previously served as Head of Cabinet to the African Union Commissioner for Infrastructure, Energy and Digitalisation.

*Culled from October Issue of PAV Magazine