NEW YORK, Sept 21– Africa needs more standardized approaches to structuring and financing infrastructure projects to reduce transaction delays, lower costs and enable successful projects to be replicated across the continent, according to Africa Finance Corporation (AFC) President and Chief Executive Officer Samaila Zubairu.
Speaking at the Global Africa Business Initiative’s (GABI) high-level Unstoppable Africa 2026 event in New York, Zubairu said African financial institutions should establish common templates, documentation and due diligence frameworks for infrastructure transactions.
He argued that repeatedly designing financing structures from the beginning limits the speed at which capital can be deployed, particularly for projects that share similar risk and contractual characteristics.
“We should standardize the process, standardize documentation, so that we build and we create replicability.”
Moving from individual projects to repeatable structures
Zubairu pointed to power generation as an example of how repeated negotiations can slow infrastructure development.
He said developers can spend years negotiating power purchase agreements (PPAs), even when similar projects have already established workable contractual structures.
“We build several power plants, yet it takes us three years to negotiate a PPA. We should stop that. We should look at the last one we built and use that as a template for all the others.”
The same principle, he said, should apply to project financing, where institutions can repeatedly undertake similar due diligence and documentation instead of adapting frameworks that have already been tested.
A standardized approach could allow financial institutions to move between comparable transactions more efficiently while retaining the necessary risk assessment and controls.
Channeling African savings into infrastructure
The broader objective is to improve the intermediation of Africa’s domestic financial resources into productive assets.
Zubairu said financial institutions need to develop risk-mitigation instruments that allow investors to initially assume institutional risk rather than taking on the full risks associated with individual infrastructure projects.
Such structures could make it easier for investors to participate in infrastructure financing and provide a framework that can be repeatedly applied across different projects.
“We must have a system whereby all of us, the Alliance for Financial Institutions, agree templates, agree due diligence mechanisms, standardize our systems, so that at every point of time we’re rinsing and repeating what we’re doing, not starting from the beginning.”
The approach is intended to address a broader challenge in African infrastructure finance, where substantial domestic savings coexist with significant infrastructure investment needs, but capital does not always flow efficiently into long-term productive assets.
Infrastructure as a foundation for industrialization
For AFC, improving the financing process is closely connected to Africa’s broader industrialization agenda.
Zubairu said infrastructure investment should enable African economies to process more of their own natural resources, create employment and retain a greater share of economic value within the continent.
“Our job is to build the infrastructure that will make Africa process what we have, create jobs on the continent, and capture and retain value here in Africa.”
Standardized financing frameworks could therefore extend beyond reducing the time required to close individual transactions. The objective is to create a more repeatable infrastructure investment system that allows capital providers to build on established structures rather than repeatedly starting from scratch.
For African economies seeking to expand power generation, transport networks, industrial capacity and other productive infrastructure, greater standardization could help connect domestic capital with projects at greater speed and scale.
