The announcement ran in every major outlet covering the sector: a $1.2 billion commitment toward regional grid infrastructure, unveiled at a high-profile summit, framed as decisive proof that the financing gap was closing. Four years later, roughly a fifth of that sum had actually been disbursed. Construction had begun on two of the seven planned components. The rest sat in various states of procurement, land acquisition, and contractual renegotiation, none of it visible from the outside, none of it contradicting the original headline, which by then had been cited in at least a dozen subsequent reports as evidence of the sum already secured. Nothing about the commitment had been dishonest. The capital genuinely existed, and the institutions behind it genuinely intended to deploy it. What the headline never captured, because headlines are not built to capture it, was the distance between committing capital and turning it into a transmission line carrying power.
This is the least discussed stage in the entire arc this series has traced. Article 1 established that capital exists. Article 2 established that risk determines whether it moves. Article 3 established that bankability has to be built. Article 4 established that structure determines what kind of capital fits. Article 5 established that access determines whether institutional capital can reach a prepared opportunity at all. This article addresses what happens after all five of those conditions have been satisfied, after a project has been prepared, its risk translated, its capital stack designed, and committed capital has actually arrived, and asks why so much of that capital still takes years, sometimes many years, to become an operating asset.
The Chain Nobody Draws Out in Full
Financial commitment and infrastructure delivery are treated, in public discourse, as though they were nearly the same event, separated by a routine interval of implementation. They are not the same event. Between them lies a chain with at least nine distinct stages: announcement, where a commitment is publicly declared; commitment, where it is formally approved within an institution’s own governance process; financial close, where the transaction’s legal and financial terms are finalised and binding; disbursement, where capital actually begins moving against agreed conditions; procurement, where contractors, suppliers and equipment are competitively selected; construction, where the physical asset is actually built; commissioning, where the completed asset is tested and brought into service; operation, where it begins functioning as intended; and performance, where it is confirmed to be delivering the outcomes, power generated, freight moved, water supplied, that justified building it in the first place.
Each transition between these stages is a place where capital can stall, and in practice, each one regularly does. The public conversation about infrastructure finance overwhelmingly concentrates on the first three stages, announcement, commitment, financial close, because these are the events that produce press releases, summit headlines, and figures that can be added up across institutions to produce an impressive aggregate number. The remaining six stages, where a commitment actually becomes a functioning piece of infrastructure, receive almost no comparable visibility, and it is precisely there that most of the delay, cost overrun, and outright failure in infrastructure delivery occurs.
Where Capital Gets Trapped
The gap between disbursement and construction is where the largest volume of committed capital sits idle longest, and the reasons are rarely financial. Land acquisition and resettlement, frequently treated as a formality during structuring, routinely takes years when a project’s alignment crosses multiple jurisdictions, involves informal land tenure, or requires compensation frameworks that were drafted but never actually implemented. Permitting delays compound this: environmental approvals, construction permits, and sector-specific regulatory sign-offs often depend on government agencies with limited capacity, competing priorities, and no institutional incentive tied to a project’s financing timeline. Procurement, meant to ensure value for money and transparency, becomes a source of delay in its own right when institutional capacity to run a competitive process is thin, producing repeated re-tendering, legal challenges, or procurement outcomes that then require renegotiation with the financing already in place. Disbursement conditions, the very safeguards designed to ensure capital is used properly, can themselves become a bottleneck when the conditions precedent to each drawdown require documentation or milestones that the implementing agency lacks the capacity to produce on schedule. Political transitions, a change in government, a new minister with different priorities, a shift in the fiscal environment, can freeze a project that was fully financed and contractually committed under a previous administration, with no financial mechanism to unfreeze it beyond time and renewed political will. Developer and contractor capability gaps, invisible during financial close, become visible during construction, when the entity responsible for actually building the asset turns out to lack the project-management depth the transaction assumed it had. And weak implementation monitoring means that when any of these frictions occurs, it is frequently detected late, well after the delay has compounded, because no one in the transaction’s governance structure has the specific mandate to track physical progress against the financial commitment in real time.
None of these frictions is primarily a capital problem. All of them stall capital that has already been committed, structured, and disbursed against, in principle, a bankable project. This is the deployment gap: the distance between money that has formally entered a project and the infrastructure that money was meant to produce, a distance measured not in financing terms but in institutional and implementation capacity, and one the industry has been remarkably slow to treat as a distinct problem requiring its own architecture.
The Trouble With “$X Billion Committed”
The habit of measuring success in dollars committed, rather than assets delivered, is not a harmless simplification. It actively obscures the deployment gap by rewarding the stages of the chain that are easiest to announce and hardest to hold accountable. An institution that commits capital receives credit at the moment of commitment, regardless of what happens afterward; the incentive to track disbursement, let alone construction progress or eventual performance, is comparatively weak, because very little of an institution’s public credibility depends on it. This produces a system-wide bias toward generating announceable commitments and a corresponding underinvestment in the unglamorous, harder-to-headline work of actually moving projects through procurement, land acquisition and construction. A more honest accounting of the infrastructure gap would report not committed capital but capital that has reached construction, and would treat the difference between the two figures, in most markets, an uncomfortably large one, as the primary metric of system performance.
Beyond “Faster Implementation”
The instinctive response to the deployment gap, implemented faster, misdiagnoses the problem as one of speed rather than architecture. What is actually missing, in most markets where this gap is widest, is dedicated capacity to manage the transaction through its full life cycle, not merely to close it. Project or transaction-management units, embedded either within government or as a shared service across a pipeline of projects, that carry specific responsibility for tracking a commitment from financial close through commissioning, are rare relative to how routinely they would pay for themselves in avoided delay. Delivery units modelled on infrastructure authorities that have worked in other markets, with a mandate that spans procurement, land, permitting and contractor performance rather than sitting within a single ministry’s narrower remit, address the coordination failure that causes many delays in the first place. Standardised contracts and procurement frameworks, built once and reused, reduce both the time and the legal risk of tendering, the same logic that made standardised documentation valuable at the preparation stage in Article 3 applies with equal force here. Disbursement systems designed around realistic implementation milestones, rather than milestones copied from templates built for different markets, reduce the frequency with which disbursement conditions themselves become the bottleneck. And implementation monitoring, treated as a core governance function rather than an occasional audit, catches land, permitting or contractor problems while they are still solvable rather than after they have already cost a year.
Responsibility here is genuinely shared, and pretending otherwise produces the same finger-pointing that has slowed delivery for decades. Governments hold primary responsibility for land, permitting and regulatory approvals, and for building the institutional capacity, delivery units, procurement reform, that only a government can build. Development finance institutions hold responsibility for designing disbursement conditions that are rigorous without being unworkable, and for funding the transaction-management and monitoring capacity that many implementing agencies cannot afford on their own. Investors hold responsibility for engaging with implementation risk during structuring rather than treating financial close as the end of their involvement, since the value of their capital depends entirely on what happens afterward. Developers hold responsibility for building genuine project-management capability rather than relying on the financing structure to compensate for its absence. Regulators hold responsibility for processing approvals within timeframes that respect the fact that financed capital has a cost that accrues whether or not construction has started. And transaction advisers, whose role in this series has so far centred on structuring, have an underused role in designing the implementation architecture itself, not merely the financial terms that precede it.
The Deployment Gap Is the Missing Middle Made Physical
Every article in this series has described a different stage at which capital that exists in the world fails to become the infrastructure the world needs, unallocated risk, unbuilt bankability, mismatched structure, inaccessible form. Deployment is where all of these, even when successfully solved, meet their final and most literal test: does the money actually turn into concrete, cable, and capacity. A commitment that never reaches construction has not failed financially. It has failed physically, and the world has not yet built enough architecture to prevent that failure from being routine.
Suppose, finally, that a project clears every stage described across this series: capital committed, risk translated, bankability built, structure designed, access achieved, deployment executed, and construction completed. The asset is commissioned. It operates. At that point, one question remains that finance alone cannot answer, and it is the deepest one this series has left for last. An operating power plant, road or grid is not, by itself, development. It becomes development only if it changes the economic and social conditions it was financed to improve, and a great deal of infrastructure that is technically complete and financially successful has, on closer inspection, failed to do that.
What, precisely, did the investment actually produce?
That is the Missing Middle Between Investment and Development.
Nwafor is founder and lead strategist at De-Lazuli Consult, an advisory practice focused on energy transition, project finance, DFI engagement and infrastructure investment facilitation. He writes from Lagos and Abuja. chidi.nwafor@de-lazuliconsult.com