Infrastructure projects across Africa, roads, storage facilities, power and utility assets, routinely promise strong long-term returns, and the underlying demand is genuine in most markets. Yet a large share of proposed infrastructure projects never reach financial close. The gap is rarely the opportunity itself; it is the evaluation and structuring work that has to happen before capital can responsibly commit.
Feasibility comes before financing
Investors want to see that a project has been evaluated on its own technical and commercial merits before financing conversations begin: realistic demand assumptions, a credible cost base, and an honest account of execution risk. Proposals that move straight to financing terms without this groundwork tend to stall once due diligence starts.
Financial structuring has to fit the asset
Infrastructure assets are capital-intensive and long-lived, which means the financing structure has to match that profile: appropriate tenor, a realistic mix of debt and equity, and clarity on who bears which risks over the life of the project. A structure copied from a shorter-cycle investment rarely survives contact with an infrastructure asset's actual cash flow pattern.
Public-private coordination is not optional
Most infrastructure projects of any scale involve public authorities at some stage, whether for permitting, land, regulatory approval or co-investment. Investors look for evidence that this coordination has already started, rather than being treated as a formality to sort out after capital is committed.
Where advisory support fits
Knowis Group Investments supports infrastructure initiatives at exactly these stages: early feasibility review, financial structuring for capital-intensive developments, and coordination between public authorities and private investors, drawing on experience delivering large-scale logistics and fuel infrastructure transactions elsewhere in the group. This is a developing area of our advisory practice, and we are transparent with partners about where our infrastructure-specific track record currently stands.
For investors, the practical takeaway is to treat feasibility, structuring and public coordination as prerequisites, not parallel workstreams. Projects that get these three elements right before seeking capital move noticeably faster once they do.
Sizing risk correctly from the start
Infrastructure risk is not evenly distributed across the life of a project. Construction risk, demand risk and regulatory risk each peak at different stages, and investors who apply a single risk premium across the whole project tend to either overpay for early-stage risk or underprice risk that only appears later. A structuring process that separates these risk categories, and allocates each one to the party best able to manage it, produces financing terms that are both more competitive and more durable.
Lessons from adjacent sectors
Some of the most useful lessons for infrastructure evaluation come from adjacent sectors rather than infrastructure itself. Our experience delivering large-scale fleet and fuel infrastructure transactions has shown, repeatedly, that capital-intensive assets only perform as modelled when procurement, logistics and maintenance planning are addressed before the asset is commissioned, not afterward. That same discipline, planning execution detail before capital commits rather than after, is what we bring to infrastructure feasibility and structuring work more broadly.
A developing part of our advisory practice
We are direct with partners about where our infrastructure-specific track record currently stands, and we apply the same evaluation and structuring discipline used across our other sectors to every new infrastructure mandate we take on, rather than presenting a track record we have not yet built.
