Mitrelli: Making African Infrastructure Bankable and Financeable
In this episode of Uxolo: In-Depth With, Jessica Brown speaks with Yoav Brick of Mitrelli, recorded live in Prague, about the challenges of financing infrastructure across Africa and how governments, EPC contractors, DFIs, ECAs and private investors can work together to bring projects to financial close.
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Mitrelli: Making African Infrastructure Bankable and Financeable
In this episode of Uxolo: In-Depth With, Jessica Brown speaks with Yoav Brick of Mitrelli, recorded live in Prague, about the challenges of financing infrastructure across Africa and how governments, EPC contractors, DFIs, ECAs and private investors can work together to bring projects to financial close.
About Mitrelli
Mitrelli is a Swiss-based EPC contractor focused exclusively on Africa, delivering social infrastructure projects in partnership with governments, financial institutions and public entities.
The company operates across markets including Angola, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and Mozambique, with a focus on turning strategic national priorities into bankable and implementable infrastructure projects.
Key themes
The Bankability Challenge
Africa's infrastructure financing gap is not simply a question of whether capital exists.
The challenge is creating projects that are both:
- Bankable for lenders and investors
- Affordable within government fiscal constraints
- Structured to mitigate project and revenue risks
- Aligned with national development priorities
Governments across Africa face increasing debt sustainability and budget pressures, while many infrastructure projects are not sufficiently structured to attract financing.
The priority is therefore to develop projects that can move from strategic ambition to financially viable implementation.
EPC Contractors Putting Skin in the Game
EPC contractors can play a role beyond simply designing and constructing infrastructure.
When contractors invest their own capital or assume financial risk, they demonstrate:
- Commitment to the project
- Confidence in its viability
- Alignment with lenders and other investors
- Greater accountability throughout the project lifecycle
For Mitrelli, this willingness to invest its own capital can help attract additional financing and turn the EPC contractor from a service provider into a project partner.
Blended Finance as a Financing Tool
Blended finance is increasingly important in markets where governments have limited fiscal space.
By combining concessional funding with commercial financing, blended structures can:
- Reduce the overall cost of capital
- Improve repayment terms for governments
- Make projects more affordable
- Bridge the gap between project costs and government budgets
- Enable projects that might otherwise remain unfinanced
Even a relatively small concessional tranche can reshape the overall repayment profile of a project and help keep sovereign borrowing within fiscal limits.
Blended finance is increasingly becoming less of a support mechanism and more of a core tool for infrastructure delivery.
The Growing Role of Multi-ECA Financing
Country risk constraints can limit the amount of financing a single ECA is able to provide.
Multi-ECA structures offer an alternative by allowing several agencies to share the risk.
In one recent Mitrelli transaction, three ECAs were required because no single agency had sufficient capacity to support the project.
While this approach increases transaction complexity, it can make financing possible where a single ECA structure would not.
Mitrelli's internal capabilities are increasingly geared towards coordinating these complex structures across project design, procurement and financing.
Project Preparation Comes Before Bankability
A project cannot become investible without adequate preparation.
Critical elements include:
- Feasibility studies
- Environmental and social impact assessments
- Clear contractual frameworks
- Detailed sourcing plans
- Early works
- Identification and mitigation of risks
However, project preparation itself requires significant upfront investment.
Environmental and social impact assessments alone can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, often before there is any guarantee that a project will ultimately materialise.
This creates an important financing gap before financing even begins.
Mitrelli's willingness to invest in preparation ahead of financial close can help demonstrate commitment and build confidence among potential partners.
What DFIs Can Do Better
Development finance institutions have a critical role to play in mobilising private capital, but the process needs to become faster and more predictable.
Key priorities include:
- Faster decision-making
- Greater flexibility in financing structures
- More standardised documentation
- Standardised processes
- Reduced transaction costs
- Shorter financial structuring timelines
Infrastructure transactions in Africa can take several years to reach financial close.
For private capital, lengthy and uncertain processes can be a significant deterrent.
Making transactions more predictable could help unlock substantially greater participation from commercial investors.
Localisation and Long-Term Economic Impact
Infrastructure investment needs to deliver more than physical assets.
Localisation can create:
- Jobs
- Skills transfer
- Local business opportunities
- Stronger domestic economic capacity
- Greater political and social support
Mitrelli assesses the social return on investment of its projects to understand the wider economic and social value they can create.
The objective is not simply to build infrastructure, but to maximise the long-term impact that infrastructure can have on local populations and economies.
Making Infrastructure Financing More Scalable
The infrastructure projects that successfully reach financial close are increasingly those that combine multiple sources of capital intelligently.
This means bringing together:
- Concessional finance
- ECA-backed financing
- Commercial debt
- DFI capital
- EPC investment
Rather than relying on a single financing source, the challenge is designing structures that distribute risk appropriately while keeping projects affordable for governments.
Episode takeaway
Africa's infrastructure challenge is not simply about finding more capital.
It is about making projects:
- Bankable
- Affordable
- Well prepared
- Predictable
- Structured for multiple sources of finance
Mitrelli's experience highlights the importance of collaboration between governments, EPC contractors, DFIs, ECAs and investors.
Blended finance can bridge affordability gaps.
Multi-ECA structures can overcome individual country-risk constraints.
EPC skin in the game can demonstrate commitment and reduce execution risk.
And stronger project preparation can give investors the confidence they need to participate.
Ultimately, the next phase of African infrastructure investment may depend on making the financing process simpler, faster and more predictable.
If projects can move away from being bespoke, one-off transactions towards more standardised and repeatable structures, infrastructure can begin to look less like an individual financing challenge - and more like a scalable investment opportunity.
