Two different problems wearing the same name.

When a project fails to reach financial close, the standard explanation is that it was not bankable. The term has a precise technical meaning in development finance: a project is bankable when it has completed the studies, assessments, and approvals required to satisfy a lender's investment committee. Feasibility studies. Environmental and social impact assessments. Financial models stress-tested against commodity price scenarios. Legal due diligence on the regulatory framework. Confirmation that the project's risk profile falls within the parameters the lender is authorised to accept.

Bankability is a threshold. Cross it, and the capital is available. The project can proceed.

But there is a second threshold that receives far less attention, and it is the one at which most projects in Central Africa actually fail. That threshold is buildability. A project is buildable when the operators, contractors, service providers, and institutional systems required to execute it actually exist in the market — at the required standard, at the required scale, and at the required time.

Bankable and buildable are not the same thing. A project can satisfy every requirement of a DFI investment committee and still fail to be built, because the execution infrastructure it depends on does not exist. This distinction — between the conditions required to commit capital and the conditions required to deploy it productively — is the gap that most analyses of African infrastructure investment fail to name clearly. It is also the gap that most consistently prevents committed capital from becoming operational infrastructure.

The preparation problem.

Before a project can be bankable, it must be prepared. Project preparation is the process of converting an identified opportunity into a document set that satisfies the requirements of a DFI investment committee. It includes technical feasibility studies, environmental and social impact assessments, financial modelling, legal due diligence, regulatory approvals, and community consultation processes. In a mature market, this process is well understood and well resourced. In the DRC or Zambia, it is neither.

Preparing a project to bankable standard in Central Africa takes two to four years and costs several million dollars. That cost must be borne before any financing is committed — before the project has a lender, before it has a financial close date, before it has any certainty of proceeding. The entity that bears the preparation cost is taking a real financial risk: if the project does not proceed, the preparation cost is lost.

In markets where the pipeline of projects is thin and the cost of preparation is high relative to the available returns, projects do not get prepared. The capital that would finance them sits idle — not because it is unavailable, but because there is nothing ready to receive it. The DFIs who are mandated to finance infrastructure in these markets find themselves with capital committed and no bankable pipeline to deploy it into. They respond by funding project preparation facilities — the IFC's InfraVentures, the African Development Bank's Africa50, the G20's Global Infrastructure Facility — which are useful but insufficient to close the preparation gap at scale.

The preparation problem is not a financing problem. It is a capability problem. The engineers, environmental consultants, financial modellers, and legal advisers who can prepare a project to IFC standard in the DRC are few. They are expensive. They are in demand across multiple markets simultaneously. And they are not being trained and developed at the rate required to close the gap between the pipeline of potential projects and the pipeline of bankable ones.

The execution gap.

Even when a project reaches financial close, it must be built. This is where the second threshold — buildability — becomes decisive.

Building industrial infrastructure in Central Africa requires a specific set of capabilities that are not widely available. The contractor who can manage construction of a power plant in Lualaba Province must be able to source materials and equipment through supply chains that are not designed for the region, manage a workforce that may require significant training and development, navigate a regulatory environment that is complex and sometimes unpredictable, and maintain the security and community relations protocols required by the project's DFI financiers. These are not generic construction management skills. They are specialised capabilities built through experience in the specific environment.

The pool of contractors who have these capabilities is small. The pool who have them at the scale required for major infrastructure projects is smaller still. And the pool who have them while also meeting the compliance requirements of IFC Performance Standards — the environmental management systems, the labour standards, the community engagement protocols — is smaller again.

This creates a bottleneck that is invisible in most analyses of the infrastructure investment gap. The analyses focus on the capital side of the equation: how much is committed, how much is disbursed, how much is needed. They do not focus on the execution side: how many contractors can actually build the projects that the capital is committed to finance. The answer, in Central Africa today, is: not enough.

The consequence is project delay. Projects that have reached financial close — that have satisfied every requirement of the DFI investment committee, that have committed capital, that have signed construction contracts — take longer to build than projected, cost more than budgeted, and in some cases fail to reach completion. The delays are not primarily caused by political instability or regulatory failure, though both contribute. They are primarily caused by the thinness of the execution infrastructure: the shortage of contractors, operators, and service providers who can deliver at the required standard.

"The operators who are building execution capability now will be the ones who can absorb capital when the pipeline matures."

The institutional service gap.

Below the level of the primary contractor, there is a further layer of the execution infrastructure that is even thinner: the institutional service providers who support the ongoing operation of completed infrastructure.

A DFI-financed mining operation or industrial facility requires, throughout its operating life, service providers who can meet institutional compliance standards. Power supply that meets IFC Performance Standard 3. Security services that comply with the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights. Workforce accommodation that meets Performance Standard 2 on labour and working conditions. Environmental management that meets Performance Standard 6. Community engagement that meets Performance Standard 5.

These are not aspirational standards. They are contractual requirements embedded in the financing agreements. A mining operation that fails to meet them risks covenant breach, which can trigger acceleration of the DFI loan. The consequences of non-compliance are financial and operational, not merely reputational.

The service providers who can meet these requirements must themselves have the systems, the personnel, the governance structures, and the track record to demonstrate compliance. That demonstration requires investment — in ISO certification, in staff training, in management systems, in audit processes — that takes years to build and cannot be shortcut. A service provider who has not made that investment cannot credibly claim to meet institutional standards, regardless of what its marketing materials say.

In Central Africa today, the supply of service providers who genuinely meet these standards is insufficient to serve the pipeline of DFI-financed projects that is currently in development or in operation. The institutional mining operators who need these services are competing for a limited pool of providers who can actually deliver them. The projects that cannot find compliant service providers face a choice between accepting substandard providers and the compliance risks they create, or building the service capability themselves — which is expensive, slow, and outside the core competence of a mining company or infrastructure developer.

Governance and regulatory sequencing.

There is a third dimension of the buildability problem that is distinct from both project preparation and execution capability: the sequencing of governance and regulatory approvals.

A project that is bankable has, by definition, received the regulatory approvals required to satisfy the DFI investment committee. But regulatory approval is not a single event. It is a sequence of decisions by multiple government agencies, each with its own timeline, its own requirements, and its own institutional capacity. In the DRC, a mining project may require approvals from the Ministry of Mines, the Ministry of Environment, the Ministry of Land Affairs, the provincial government, and the relevant customary authorities. Each approval is a dependency for the next. A delay in one creates a cascade of delays in the others.

The sequencing problem is compounded by the institutional capacity of the approving agencies. The Ministry of Mines in the DRC is responsible for regulating one of the world's most complex and consequential mining sectors with a fraction of the institutional resources available to comparable agencies in Australia, Canada, or Chile. The environmental assessment process that takes six months in a mature regulatory environment may take two years in the DRC — not because the standards are lower, but because the institutional capacity to process applications, conduct reviews, and issue decisions is constrained.

This is not a criticism of the regulatory framework. The DRC's mining code is, in many respects, well designed. The problem is the gap between the framework and the institutional capacity to implement it. Closing that gap requires sustained investment in regulatory capacity — in training, in systems, in personnel — that is neither glamorous nor easily financeable through the instruments available to DFIs. It is, however, essential to the buildability of the project pipeline.

What this means for the investment thesis.

The distinction between bankable and buildable has a direct implication for how capital should be positioned in Central Africa.

If the primary constraint on infrastructure development were capital availability, the right investment thesis would be to provide more capital — more first-loss tranches, more political risk insurance, more blended finance structures. There is a role for all of these instruments, and they are being deployed. But they address the bankability threshold, not the buildability threshold. More capital committed to a thin execution infrastructure does not produce more infrastructure. It produces more projects waiting to be built.

If the primary constraint is buildability — the availability of contractors, operators, service providers, and institutional systems capable of executing the projects that capital is committed to finance — then the right investment thesis is different. It is to build the execution capability that converts committed capital into operational infrastructure. To develop the contractors who can build to IFC standards. To develop the service providers who can operate to institutional compliance requirements. To invest in the regulatory capacity that allows approvals to be processed at the pace the project pipeline requires.

This is a less familiar investment thesis than the capital provision thesis. It does not fit neatly into the categories that most DFI mandates are designed to address. It requires a longer time horizon, a higher tolerance for operational complexity, and a willingness to build capability rather than simply deploy capital. But it is the thesis that addresses the actual constraint.

Where Vika Group fits within this argument.

Vika Group is not a capital provider. There is no shortage of capital committed to Central African infrastructure. What Vika Group is building is execution capability — the platforms, the systems, the compliance infrastructure, and the operational track record that allow institutional capital to be deployed productively in this environment.

Vika Energy, BASTION, and Domaine Imara are each responses to a specific gap in the execution infrastructure. Each is designed to meet the institutional compliance standards that DFI-financed projects require. Each is being built with the time horizon that genuine capability development demands — not the timeline of a project cycle, but the timeline of an institution.

The argument is not that Vika Group is the only operator building this way. It is that the operators who are building execution capability in this environment — whoever they are — are addressing the constraint that actually limits the conversion of committed capital into productive infrastructure. They are building the missing layer of the ecosystem. And the missing layer, once built, is the layer that everything else depends on.

Bankable is not buildable.