Solomon Asamoah

Home: Ghana and London. Age: Older than I look. Birthplace: Ghana. Profession: Infrastructure investment and development finance. Organization: Retired. Strategic advisory and boards. Former senior roles at HSBC in London; IFC in Washington DC and South Africa; Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) in Johannesburg; Africa Finance Corporation (AFC) in Lagos; AfDB in Abidjan; and Ghana Infrastructure Investment Fund (GIIF) in Accra. Pronouns: He/Him/His. Alma mater: Imperial College London (Chemical Engineering); Harvard Business School, London Business School and INSEAD (executive programmes). Current project: Writing a series of analyses on how Ghana and Africa finance, build and, just as importantly, maintain their infrastructure (from AI and data centres to growing cities), raise private capital and manage currency risk. Latest accomplishment: Organisations I have been involved with have raised more than US$200 million in Africa. Latest contribution to others: Advisory and board activities. What’s been your big (or biggest leap)? Twice I have helped build an institution from the ground up. At the Africa Finance Corporation, as Deputy CEO and Chief Investment Officer, I helped establish the institution and its investment platform, which went on to secure an A3 investment-grade rating from Moody’s. I then did much the same for Ghana’s sovereign infrastructure fund, the GIIF, growing it from a US$250 million fund to more than US$500 million and building it into a credible investor in national infrastructure. Building institutions that outlast the people who run them is the work I am proudest of. Hobbies: Reading, writing and classic movies. Recent travel or adventure: Recently travelled to my 40th (out of 54) African country. Last book read: From Third World to First, by Lee Kuan Yew. Personal mission: Helping Africa build infrastructure that is financed soundly, maintained properly and still serving people long after opening day. Personal motto: Do the right thing when no-one is watching. Favorite quote: "It always seems impossible until it’s done" (Nelson Mandela).

Your career has moved from investment banking to development finance institutions and a sovereign fund. What connects those roles?

I began as an investment banker with HSBC Markets in London before moving into development finance. Since then I have held senior roles at the International Finance Corporation, including Chief of Staff to its CEO, the Development Bank of Southern Africa, the Africa Finance Corporation and the African Development Bank, where as Vice President I was responsible for roughly 70 percent of the Bank’s lending programme. I then led Ghana’s sovereign infrastructure fund. The thread is the same throughout: contributing to the development of Africa through structuring transactions that bring capital and ultimately improve the quality of people’s lives. Over more than three decades I have led and closed over US$5 billion in deals across Africa, and the lesson has been consistent. Good projects are rarely short of ideas, but turning them into reality takes skill, perseverance and experience.

You were the first substantive CEO of the Ghana Infrastructure Investment Fund. What did that role teach you about mobilising capital?

Over two terms at GIIF, from 2017 to 2024, we doubled the fund’s capital base from US$250 million to US$500 million through internally generated profits and international fundraising. We deployed around US$325 million into 13 infrastructure projects across seven sectors, including energy, transport, housing and logistics, and catalysed more than ten times that amount in external investment. The main lesson is that public capital works best as a catalyst rather than a substitute. Used as patient equity or a first-loss cushion below commercial debt, it allows pension, insurance and international money into sectors that may look too political or risky on a purely private basis. If done right, it can lead to win-win solutions.

How do you bring private capital into public infrastructure without losing public purpose?

Crowding in private capital is often confused with privatisation, and they are different things. The state still sets policy, defines service standards and in many cases keeps ownership of the underlying assets. Private partners bring construction discipline, operating expertise and risk capital. Public purpose has to be written into contracts, licences and tariff methodologies rather than left to goodwill. Investors flee ambiguity more than they flee risk, so the government’s job is to offer certainty of process and fair risk allocation, not certainty of private profit. Published contracts where confidentiality allows, independent technical audits and competitive procurement as the default are what keep the public in the room. In the broadest sense, contracts need to be “fair” and to be seen as “fair”, else they can be revisited when governments change.

You argue that building infrastructure is only the beginning. Why does maintenance matter so much?

Opening day is a milestone, not a finish line. Maintenance tends to lose the political contest because ribbon cuttings are visible and a bridge that did not fail is not. Yet World Bank analysis shows that once roads fall into poor condition, rehabilitation can cost five to seven times more than timely upkeep, and recent assessments put Ghana’s available maintenance resources at only about 37 percent of estimated needs. Every major project should arrive with an agreed maintenance plan, a realistic multi-year cost envelope and a named institutional owner. In a constrained fiscal environment, the cheapest new infrastructure Ghana can buy is often the infrastructure it already owns.

How should Ghana choose between local currency and international financing, given the volatility of the cedi?

The common error is to compare a dollar coupon with a cedi coupon as if they were the same product. A cheaper-looking dollar loan can become the more expensive obligation after a sharp move in the exchange rate, because debt service stays in hard currency while tariffs are collected in cedis. My working rule is to prefer local currency where revenues are overwhelmingly local and domestic pension and insurance capital can be organised at useful scale, and to use international finance where imported equipment or market depth genuinely requires it. Where possible, the currency risk should then be hedged, buffered or shared explicitly. Depreciation is a design parameter that serious infrastructure finance must treat as central. Amongst the best things a country can do to support this is to provide macroeconomic stability (managed borrowing and expenditure to support lower interest rates) and create the conditions to encourage the development of strong local banks and financial markets.

African cities are growing faster than their budgets. How should they finance that growth?

Cities in Africa cannot wait for central government to underwrite every street. The tools are well known: property rates built on accurate and regularly revalued rolls, land value capture around public investment, and development charges that ask those who gain from new networks to help pay for them. Sequencing is the part I would not compromise on. Before a city borrows or brings in private partners, it needs credible accounts, dependable revenue collection and a transparent project pipeline. Domestic institutional investors will finance ring-fenced cash flows from rates, charges and contracted services when governance is credible. They will not finance municipal fantasy.

What does the growth of artificial intelligence mean for African infrastructure?

Artificial intelligence is usually discussed as software, but its limits are increasingly physical. Every model depends on data centres that need continuous electricity, cooling, fibre and engineers who can keep the equipment running. The World Bank reports that more than 560 million people in sub-Saharan Africa still lack electricity, so a data-centre connection is never just another commercial load. Avoiding data centres is not the answer, and nor is approving them wherever a developer proposes. Approval should start with resource budgets for power and water, tested against drought, heat and grid outages, and with clarity on who pays for and owns the new grid assets. Compute cannot outrun power and water.

‍