AIR TRANSPORT AND AIRPORTS
African airport concessions return, with multilateral money and tighter terms
Terminal and systems concessions are being tendered across West and East Africa, most with development bank funding and published evaluation criteria.
Aerospace Garage desk
Airport concessions are being tendered again across Africa after a decade in which several earlier deals collapsed or were renegotiated. The difference this time is funding structure: multilateral development banks are underwriting a majority of the current pipeline.
That changes the risk profile materially. Multilateral funding brings published evaluation criteria, slower but more predictable award, and payment certainty that privately funded African infrastructure has often lacked.
For bidders the trade-off is margin against reliability. These contracts price tighter than the private deals of the 2010s, but they are far more likely to actually pay.
Our read: read the funding source before the contract value. It predicts whether a tender completes better than any other single factor.
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