Afreximbank and the Development Bank of Southern Africa are deepening cooperation around project preparation and trade finance, targeting a persistent bottleneck between African infrastructure concepts and transactions capable of attracting long-term capital.
The institutions’ cooperation reflects a broader challenge in African development finance: projects can struggle to reach the technical, legal and commercial maturity required by lenders and investors even where the underlying infrastructure need is clear.
The financing gap before financing
Project preparation can include feasibility studies, environmental and social assessments, engineering work, transaction structuring and legal preparation. Without this groundwork, potentially viable projects may fail to reach financial close.
DBSA operates across the infrastructure development value chain, including project planning and preparation, financing and implementation, while Afreximbank has increasingly combined trade finance with project-development support for industrial and trade-enabling infrastructure.
Mobilising larger pools of capital
The development-finance logic is that relatively targeted preparation funding can help create a pipeline of investable projects capable of mobilising substantially larger pools of public and private capital.
Sources
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