The opportunity

Africa’s Copperbelt region has emerged as a key supplier of metals driving the global energy transition, with production volumes of copper, cobalt, and other critical minerals growing year-on-year.

However, the opportunity is constrained by weak inter-government policy alignment, a lack of in-county value addition, and export infrastructure bottlenecks.

An opportunity was identified to develop a flexible investment vehicle (HoldCo) to deploy patient capital into projects that alleviate trade facilitation bottlenecks—from railway rehabilitation to port expansion and modernized refining and processing.

The solution

Portico’s Managing Partner designed a multi-stakeholder platform to appraise, finance, de-risk and execute projects at speed across central and southern Africa’s transport corridors.

A flexible pool of pre-allocated equity financing enabled ‘fast starts’ on DevCo feasibility studies and early works, while the presence of both governments and companies involved in the off-take of battery minerals helped to solve the coordination challenges that traditionally undermine cross-border infrastructure development.