To bridge the gap between financial institutions and project developers, Enlit Africa 2026 has introduced a range of programmes that increase awareness of stakeholder concerns and align project developers with investor expectations, says event organiser VUKA Group.

The event, which will be held at the Cape Town International Conference Centre from May 19 to 21, brings together stakeholders that shape energy and water infrastructure development. The Project & Investment Network (P&IN) brings together developers, financiers, utilities, government and private sector to move Africa’s project pipeline forward.

“The purpose of the event is not to facilitate casual networking, but decision-making meetings. This is reinforced by dedicated deal rooms, rapid fire project briefings and investor-developer touchpoints across multiple days,” VUKA Group content head for power, energy and water Claire Volkwyn comments.

She argues that while there is no shortage of announcements, memoranda and pipeline lists, investors, development finance institutions (DFIs) and lenders repeatedly describe the same frustration: a large share of project opportunities across Africa’s power and water sectors arrive too early, scant on detail or too ambiguously structured to progress through real due diligence processes.

Developers need to advance projects through complex permitting environments, uncertain offtake frameworks and misaligned stakeholder expectations for a national grid that might not be ready for the project.

“Therein lies the conflict between viability and bankability,” says Volkwyn.

Testing Bankability

The concept of bankability and its practice is broad and is determined by the individual financial stakeholder, resulting in unforeseen pitfalls owing to the gap between what an investor requires and what a project developer believes is viable.

These pitfalls include lender-grade evidence on technical performance, sufficient pre-project scoping, optimistic capital and operating expenditure assumptions, energy performance certificate readiness, operations and maintenance strategy, as well as grid integration risk.

Projects also encounter difficulty with offtake and revenue fragility, permitting and land risk, over-optimistic timelines and documentation gaps.

“Most energy projects do not fail because the technology is unproven, they stall because the fundamentals are not yet ready for capital. This means that, in practical terms, the friction points cluster around revenue certainty – offtake, tariff realism, creditworthiness and enforcement and grid access, including connection capacity, timelines and the transmission build-out required to make delivery feasible.”

P&IN’s targeted project briefings focus on mitigating delivery constraints, risk allocation and realistic milestones. Curated discussions with decision-makers from utilities, government and finance are intended to pressure-test what is required to move projects forward.

“The practical emphasis is on defining immediate milestones that shift a project towards bankability.”

Volkwyn adds that the discussions are curated with two imperatives in mind. The first emphasises project briefings and action-orientated sessions to ensure that conversations start with a shared view of constraints and bankability, while the second ensures capital, utilities and delivery partners are in the same space through shared infrastructure and a curated programme.

Moreover, P&IN aims to improve how country and currency risk in Africa is understood, allocated and mitigated by aligning relevant stakeholders early in the project development process. Early risk discovery also exposes project deal-breakers and challenges pertaining to convertibility, repatriation, access to foreign currency markets, tariff indexation and political risk before developers spend heavily on the wrong structuring path.

It also allows for access to de-risking tools and provides clarity on how credit guarantees and blended finance are typically structured, as well as benchmarking requirements, across multiple countries.

Platform for Delivery

The 2026 programme tracks the policy and regulatory shifts most likely to move investment decisions on energy, market reform, utilities’ restructuring and unbundling, market design, tariffs and governance.

Global trends that tend to affect Africa’s energy and water sectors in the form of fuel price volatility, supply chain disruptions, insurance and financing costs, geopolitical risk premiums and sudden shifts in the availability of capital – such as the recent developments in the Middle East – are incorporated into the sessions.

Enlit helps attendees to target potential challenges through scenario and resilience planning by focusing on grid disturbances and system resilience; brings together utilities, developers and technology providers to share knowledge and experience; and focuses on delivery and practical outcomes rather than theoretical and academic discussions.

The programme overview includes strategies on policy, reform, capital and infrastructure decisions. Attendees will also be exposed to conversations regarding innovation, municipal forums, water security in Africa, women and diversity in the water and energy industries, as well as nuclear power in Africa.

The Power Hub, Water Hub, Data Centre Summit and Mobility programmes aim to provide technical and aligned strategic insights for attendees to ensure that meaningful insights are gained throughout the event.

Most sessions on the exhibition floor are open to all attendees, including visitors, supporting cross-sector engagement between engineers, financiers, policymakers and operators.

Enlit Africa 2026 is expecting to host 7 000 attendees, with strong continental support.

Developers can apply to present projects to investors and DFIs through P&IN, while investors and finance institutions may request the investor book and participation criteria.

Volkwyn invites utility and public-sector leaders to participate in decision-focused dialogues on delivery constraints and investment readiness, as well as to attend technical site visits that showcase solutions in African conditions, reinforcing the event’s emphasis on practical implementation.