The Field/Ground level
Evidence, at
ground level.
The forces are visible in specific places. Here is what a few of them look like up close.
What it looks like up close/01
Each of these is a place where one of the nine forces stops being a statistic. What is being built is usually clear. What decides whether it works is the part worth reading.
Lagos, Nigeria
CitiesA new financial district is being built on reclaimed coastal land, behind a hard sea defence that has to hold before anything above it matters.
Whether the sea defence is maintained on the schedule it was designed to, and whether power and water reach the plots at the rate the buildings arrive. Reclamation is the cheap half. The services under the street are what decide if the district works.
The same wall that makes the district possible is the reason a neighbourhood behind it still has streets.
Lekki, Nigeria
IndustryRefining capacity at continental scale, in a country that spent decades exporting crude and buying back the fuel made from it.
Whether domestic pricing holds against export netbacks. A refinery can sell into the local market or into the export market, and the gap between those two prices decides which one it serves.
Fuel refined here is fuel that is not bought back at someone else's price.
Angola, DRC, Zambia
IndustryA rail corridor across three countries, concessioned to move copper west to the Atlantic instead of the long way east.
Whether volumes are high enough to fund the rehabilitation capex. The track exists; the question is throughput and who commits tonnage to it before it is proven.
A corridor is not only tonnage. It puts every town along the line on a trade route.
Benishangul-Gumuz, Ethiopia
PowerHydro capacity large enough to change the electricity balance of a region, not just a country.
Transmission and regional offtake agreements. Generation without lines to carry it, and neighbours contracted to buy it, is a stranded asset with a very large price tag.
A grid is not only megawatts. It is a factory that can run a second shift, and the people it hires to do it.
Nairobi, Kenya
DigitalCompute capacity and payment rails arriving ahead of the grid interconnection they will eventually need.
Power. Data centres are among the most electricity-hungry buildings anyone constructs, and they are being built in a region where 44.9 per cent of people still have no electricity at home.
This is the floor under companies nobody has started yet.
What is on this page, and what is not
These are examples, not a portfolio and not a tracking list. Each entry describes what is being built and what determines whether it works. It does not carry project figures: capex, tonnage, completion dates or contract terms. Those belong to the parties involved, and NextStep Africa does not publish a number it cannot source.
The continental figures used across this site carry their source in the page itself. Where a project number matters to an argument, it appears in the Brief, with the document it came from.
Why these places/02
The pattern repeats.
A sea wall, a refinery, a rail corridor, a dam and a data centre have almost nothing in common as engineering. As investments they rhyme. In each one the hard part is not the asset. It is the connection to it: the maintenance schedule, the pricing rule, the committed tonnage, the transmission line, the interconnection.
That is the useful thing about looking at the continent this way. The assets differ enormously and the failure modes barely change, which means the lesson from one is worth something in the next. Anyone who learns to read the connection rather than the announcement can see a decade ahead of the headline.
The Brief/
The NextStep Africa
Brief.
What the engine turns up, every fortnight. From Lagos.
- What moved
- The change that mattered, and the number under it.
- How it connects
- The systems involved, and what one does to another.
- What it turns on
- What has to go right, and who is already building it.
- What to watch
- One indicator, and when it resolves.
SubscribeNO. 14 / T-09 DAYS
FREE. EVERY SECOND TUESDAY. READ BY DECISION-MAKERS ON THREE CONTINENTS. ONE CLICK TO LEAVE.
From the founder's desk.
NextStep Africa / Lagos