What thirty years of commodity cycles teaches us about Africa today

The standard narrative on Africa investment is that capital is scarce. It is not. Capital is plentiful for verified, structured, properly-papered transactions. What is scarce is the verification infrastructure — the layer that takes a real project and produces the documentation that institutional capital requires before it engages. This has been true for three decades. It has been true through commodity cycles up and commodity cycles down. The pattern is more durable than the underlying market conditions, which is why most cyclical analysis of African investment misses the point.

When I started in international telecoms in the early 1990s, the same gap existed: real telecoms infrastructure projects were being designed by competent local engineering teams with the right regulatory permission and the right offtake — and the projects were not being financed because the deal documentation did not survive contact with a London or New York credit committee. Thirty years later, the technology has changed, the offtake structures have changed, the regulators have changed, the participating capital has changed — and the verification gap is still where most projects die.

The implication for institutional capital deploying into Africa today is not that the market is hard; it is that the market needs a different kind of intermediary. Not a placement agent who introduces flow with a tilted incentive; not a country-rep who only knows one geography; but a verification practice that protects both sides of the introduction and only sees a fee when a transaction closes. This is what the practice at CMW Consultants is built around, and it is what we have been refining for the last decade.

The investments that survive verification today look different from the ones that were attractive a decade ago. Solar-plus-storage with structured offtake. Agrovoltaic projects that integrate land use with energy generation. Telecoms infrastructure paired with renewable on-site generation. Trade-finance flows where the documentation infrastructure has caught up with the underlying physical transaction. The market is more mature in places; the verification practice has had to mature with it.

For investors evaluating their Africa allocation, the right question is not "is now a good time?" — it has nearly always been a good time, for the right structures. The right question is "do we have an intermediary on the ground who can produce institutional-grade verification?" If the answer is no, the allocation will struggle for the same reasons it has struggled for thirty years. If the answer is yes, the rest of the work becomes tractable.