PPP Consultants
Raising competitive infrastructure finance — capital follows credibility
Capital for infrastructure is not scarce; credibility is. The projects that raise finance on competitive terms are the ones that reach the market with a structure a lender can price in a day.
PPP Consultants · September 2026
Major infrastructure projects are financed today from a wider range of sources than at any time in the past two decades. United Kingdom and European banks remain active. Middle Eastern sovereign and institutional capital is present at scale. Asian commercial and policy lenders compete on terms that reflect a strategic interest in infrastructure. Multilateral and bilateral development finance institutions continue to play a structural role, above all in Africa.
For the sponsor of a commercially viable project, the question is no longer whether capital is available. It is how to prepare the project so that the capital available can be sourced on competitive terms, from more than one lender at once. This article sets out how that is done.
The market in figures.
The supply of capital is not the constraint. The World Bank’s count of private investment commitments to infrastructure in low- and middle-income countries reached US$100.7 billion across 315 projects in 2024, 16 per cent more than in 2023.
Islamic finance, the pool most relevant to Gulf-sourced capital, held total assets of US$3.88 trillion at the end of 2024 according to the Islamic Financial Services Board, a rise of 14.9 per cent in the year. McKinsey has estimated that international investors hold up to US$550 billion in assets that could be directed to African infrastructure alone.
Against that supply, the same McKinsey study found that fewer than 10 per cent of African infrastructure projects reach financial close. The constraint is on the demand side: projects presented in a form lenders can price.
The reason lenders compete for the projects that are ready is the record of the asset class. Moody’s study of 7,354 project finance bank loans between 1983 and 2018 found a ten-year cumulative default rate of 5.0 per cent and an average ultimate recovery of 81.5 per cent. Well-structured infrastructure debt is among the safest lending a bank does. A lender that can see the structure will price it accordingly; a lender that cannot will price the uncertainty instead, or decline.
What each capital pool brings.
Each source of capital has its own diligence requirements, structural preferences and pricing, and for a project of any scale the best financing usually draws on more than one.
United Kingdom and European commercial banks bring mature project-finance documentation, risk appetite calibrated by decades of infrastructure lending, and an established secondary market. European policy lenders — the European Investment Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the bilateral development finance institutions — bring concessional terms attached to development objectives, and a due-diligence standard that other lenders will follow.
Middle Eastern capital — sovereign funds, institutional investors and Islamic banks — brings scale and a preference for structures it recognises: documentation drafted to Islamic-finance requirements, and often an equity participation alongside the debt.
Asian commercial banks bring competitive pricing where a sponsor or contractor from their home market is involved; Asian policy lenders bring infrastructure-focused capital within bilateral cooperation frameworks. African capital — the African Development Bank, the regional development finance institutions, government and commercial banks, and grant facilities — brings finance aligned to continental development priorities, and the concessional layer that makes a marginal project bankable.
Matching the project to the pool.
Selecting the financing structure is largely a matter of matching the project’s characteristics to the strengths of the available capital.
A project with steady availability-based revenue from an investment-grade public authority fits commercial-bank appetite. A project with development impact at scale benefits from policy-lender participation, and from the signal that participation sends to commercial lenders.
A project whose sponsor or contractor has ties to a Gulf or Asian market may access pricing not available through European channels. A project in Africa will usually need a development-finance anchor before commercial banks will follow.
The discipline is to approach several sources at once, each with documentation prepared to its own diligence standard, and to let them compete. Competing terms for the same mandate are the difference between the price a lender offers when it knows it is the only one at the table and the price it offers when it is not.
What the sponsor must bring.
Lenders are not equally interested in all projects. The projects that attract competitive terms share four features: a revenue source supported by evidence a lender can verify independently; a risk allocation that survives due diligence rather than being defended through it; a sponsor capability evidenced at working level; and documentation that answers the lender’s questions before they are asked.
A sponsor that reaches the market with these in place is negotiating from strength. A sponsor that reaches the market without them is negotiating from the lender’s list of concerns.
By the time a project is in front of lenders, the decisions that determine its price have been made — in the risk allocation, the revenue logic, the financial model and the sponsor evidence. The financing conversation confirms the price; it does not set it.
The model is the negotiation.
Of the four features, the financial model carries the most weight, because it is the document on which the loan is sized. A model built to be interrogated — every input traceable to a source, every sensitivity the lender will run already run, the point at which debt service fails already identified — shortens due diligence from months to weeks and removes the lender’s reason to price for uncertainty.
A model that balances but cannot be tested does the opposite. The firm’s models are built to forensic-review standard, the investigative discipline trained at the Big Four, and use Vose risk software, as used by the World Bank, for sensitivity and scenario analysis; they have withstood independent review by the Big Four audit firms and by major international banks.
That is not a credential. It is the reason lenders take the numbers at face value.
A case from the firm’s work.
Across the practice, more than US$1 billion + has been raised for PPP and large-infrastructure projects from United Kingdom and international banks, on transactions where the firm also carried the bid.
The first of those is on the public record: the Cheshire Schools PPP, the first schools project in the United Kingdom’s PPP programme to close on time and on budget, with the firm’s Chief Executive as project director. Close on time and on budget is, in the end, a financing outcome: it happens when the lenders’ due diligence finds nothing it did not expect, because the structure the lenders were asked to price was the structure the bid had been built on from the start.
The same discipline has since closed projects across eight sectors — education, health, policing, justice, civic and community, and transport among them — with the full register available on request.
What to do differently.
A sponsor raising finance for a viable project should prepare for the market before approaching it: a lender-ready information memorandum, a risk matrix and model built to pass due diligence, and a sponsor evidence base at working level. It should then approach more than one capital pool, each with documentation prepared to that pool’s standard, and let competing terms set the price. Capital follows credibility, and credibility is built deliberately, before the first lender is approached.
Sources: World Bank, Private Participation in Infrastructure Annual Report 2024. Islamic Financial Services Board, Islamic Financial Services Industry Stability Report 2025. McKinsey & Company, Solving Africa’s infrastructure paradox, March 2020. Moody’s Investors Service, Default and recovery rates for project finance bank loans, 1983–2018.