By Dr Adiele Onyeze, Chairman and CEO, Ephesus Investments and Assets Ltd
A sovereign fund or development finance institution sees many African infrastructure opportunities and takes very few first meetings. The ones it takes share a pattern: the sponsor has answered, in writing and before being asked, the questions the investment committee and the integrity team will raise. This brief lists those questions in the order they are usually asked.
1. Who are you, and who owns you?
Before a project is discussed, the investor’s integrity team wants the legal name and registration of the sponsor and of any intermediary, the registered office, the beneficial owners above the local threshold, and any politically exposed persons among directors and shareholders. IFC states plainly that it will not invest if it does not know the identity and reputation of its clients, and it extends that check to co-investors, agents and advisers. Arrive with a certificate of incorporation, a current register extract and signed PEP declarations, and the first meeting can be about the project.
2. Does the government counterparty know about this, and has it approved the route?
For a PPP, the investor needs to see which ministry or agency owns the project, where it sits in the national pipeline, and whether the procurement route has been approved by the PPP unit and the Treasury. A project that is in the published PPP pipeline, with a feasibility study accepted by the contracting authority, is a different conversation from a concept a sponsor has discussed informally with an official.
3. What do the numbers rest on?
Capital cost, revenue, demand and returns should trace to a dated study with its assumptions stated: the exchange rate used, the price basis year, the demand survey, the tariff or payment mechanism. If the study is several years old, say what has changed since: currency, construction costs, traffic, competing supply. An investor will discount undated figures to zero.
4. What exactly are you asking for?
Size, instrument and tenor. Equity, mezzanine or senior debt; in what currency; over what horizon; with what expected return and exit. If the government is contributing land, guarantees, viability-gap funding or an availability payment, set that out as a schedule, not a sentence. The clearer the ask, the faster it can be matched to a mandate or declined.
5. Who carries which risk?
A one-page risk-allocation matrix answers more questions than a forty-page narrative: construction, demand, currency, political, regulatory, environmental and social, and who bears each between the government, the project company, the contractor and the lenders. Where the host country’s PPP law fixes part of the allocation, cite it.
6. Who will deliver it?
Investors fund teams as much as assets. Name the roles already filled on the delivery consortium (lead sponsor, EPC, operator, advisers) and the roles still open. References that can be called are worth more than logos on a slide.
7. How does this reach financial close, and when?
A dated sequence from where the project stands today through approvals, definitive agreements and conditions precedent to close, with the parties responsible for each step. Sovereign investors plan allocations years ahead; a credible timeline lets them place the project in that plan.
What this means in practice
Most of the seven items are documents a serious sponsor already holds. The work is assembling them into one file, in the format the investor’s committee uses, and having the government counterparty confirm the parts that are its to confirm. That is what Ephesus prepares at stage 1 of its framework, before any introduction is made.
Sources: IFC, Integrity Due Diligence Process (2021); PIDG, Anti-Corruption and Integrity Policy (2025); Kenya PPP Act 2021; Tanzania PPP Act (Cap. 103) as amended 2023.
