Stellenbosch CST- 19/06/2026
There are some journeys that begin long before the flight departs. At first glance, the road to Clermont-Ferrand in the Alps of central France looked straightforward enough: travel from Cape Town to Dakar for a conference and meetings, a visit to Gorée Island, onward to aris for discussions at the headquarters of a major development finance institution, and then to Clermont-Ferrand for a conference where I would present my paper titled Market Shaping for a Just Energy Transition, and moderate a panel on subnational and regional development finance. On paper, it was simply a sequence of flights, hotels, meetings and presentations. In reality, the road itself became part of the argument.
By the time I arrived in Clermont-Ferrand, I had begun to realise that the places I had moved through were not just a backdrop to the paper. They had begun to illuminate the paper’s central concerns: the politics of institutional credibility, the uneven geographies of finance, the enduring afterlife of colonial history, and the question of what it means for African public development banks to shape markets rather than simply fill financing gaps in ways that primarily enable external investors to capture the gains.
Dakar’s debt crisis
Dakar was where the journey began to gather intellectual weight. The city has a density that pushes one beyond superficial reading. It is coastal, busy, politically alive, and historically layered. It does not readily allow neat distinctions between past and present. That was especially apparent in the conference discussions I attended there, where sovereign debt, macroeconomic coordination, financial architecture, public development banking and climate finance repeatedly converged.
The strongest impression from those sessions was that African development finance cannot be understood narrowly. The discussions moved across sovereign risk, debt vulnerability, country platforms, ratings, debt distress, cost of capital, and the possibilities and limits of climate finance. These were not separate technical themes. They were expressions of the same wider structural problem: countries and institutions on the continent are expected to finance transition, resilience, industrialisation and development while operating within a global financial system that often treats them as inherently riskier, less credible and more fragile than their counterparts elsewhere.
Again and again, the same point surfaced in different forms. It is not enough to say that finance exists somewhere in the world. What matters is the price of that finance, the tenor, the conditions attached to it, and the wider assumptions of trust or suspicion that shape whether it flows at all. This is precisely where the argument of my paper intersects with the argument of Mariana Mazzucato, who insists that the real question is not merely how much finance is mobilised, but how finance is shaped around public purpose. The problem is not simply scarcity. It is architecture.
That insight was not yet a settled conclusion in Dakar. It was gathering through fragments: concerns about debt sustainability, reflections on delayed transitions, discussions of ratings, warnings about the cost of capital, and repeated evidence that climate finance access cannot be understood without reference to the wider political-financial environment.
The presidential palace in Dakar.
The story of a toaster
Now I have stayed at many hotels over the years, many, many hotels. Some were three-star, some five-star, and some had no stars at all. Most of them, even some of the very fancy ones, I do not remember at all. But every now and then something happens in a place that stays with you, and becomes part of your fondest memory of that experience.
That happened at the hotel we stayed in on this trip. There was nothing especially fancy about the hotel itself. It was neat, well run, and I had no complaints. But the restaurant where we had breakfast was, to say the least, somewhat challenging. The phrase “slim pickings” comes to mind. Still, that is not really the point of the story.
We were there for seven nights, and on one occasion I decided I wanted toast with breakfast, just to make the meal a bit more filling. So I put a slice of bread into the toaster, but the slide mechanism on the side would not stay down. I mentioned it to the waitress, who did not seem surprised at all. She immediately called the manager and explained the problem in French. The manager simply said, “No problem, Monsieur,” asked me to go and sit down, and said he would bring the toast to me.
He then proceeded to stand there and hold the toaster lever down with his own finger until the toast was ready. He did not look irritated or embarrassed or inconvenienced. He did it as though it was the most normal thing in the world. And when he brought me the toast, it was perfectly done.
When I told my teammates about it, they found the whole incident hilarious, and of course so did I. But amusing as the story was, that manager also reminded me of something important. He embodied an attitude that, I think, we need much more of when we engage with development on the continent: humility, service, patience, commitment and care.
That is also the attitude we need when we work with DFIs across Africa. Too often, engagement with these institutions begins from a deficit mindset, as if the first instinct is to notice what is broken, what is missing, or what does not yet meet an external standard. But if we are serious about institution building, climate finance and just transitions, then we need a different posture. We need to begin with respect, work with what is there, and be willing to stay with the practical realities of institutions operating under difficult conditions.
In other words, the task is not simply to diagnose constraints from a distance. It is to engage with institutions in a way that is patient, grounded and constructive. Like that manager with the toaster, sometimes progress depends less on elegance and more on a willingness to serve, adapt and make things work with care.
And then there is the metaphor of the toaster itself, which I think often reflects the situation with many DFIs. In many cases, most of the structure is already there. The institution exists. The mandate exists. The staff are there. The developmental intention is there. The need is clear. In some cases, even the policy framework and the project pipeline are partly in place. From the outside, it may look as though everything required is already present.
And yet, something does not quite click. Something does not stay down long enough for the process to run through to completion. The issue is not always that the whole machine is absent or fundamentally broken. Often, it is that certain crucial levers are not holding. The institution may need stronger project-preparation capacity, better governance systems, more flexible instruments, stronger climate-finance readiness, or better links to concessional and local-currency finance. In other words, the challenge is often not to build everything from scratch, but to identify what needs to be adjusted, supported, stabilised or, in the case of the toaster, simply held down long enough for the desired result to emerge.
That is an important shift in mindset. It suggests that when we engage DFIs, we should not begin by assuming absence, failure or deficiency. We should begin by asking: what is already there, what is already working, and what levers need to be pulled, strengthened or held in place to enable the institution to do what it is meant to do? That is a much more respectful and developmentally useful question.
So that story may sound small, but for me it captures something quite profound. Development on the continent requires technical skill, yes, but it also requires disposition. And the right disposition is one of humility, patience and commitment, especially when engaging African DFIs as institutions that are carrying significant developmental responsibility under highly unequal conditions.
Gorée Island
If the toaster offered a metaphor, Gorée Island, a former slave centre outside Dakar, offered a much harder kind of clarity. Approaching the island by water, one first sees stillness and beauty. But the island does not allow the visitor to remain at the level of scenery. It insists on historical recognition. Gorée is not only a site of memory. It is a reminder that the modern world economy was built through slavery, forced movement, commodification and extraction. It makes visible a history that is often abstracted away in contemporary discussions of markets, capital and institutional credibility.
The objects and images from the visit remained with me, but the shackles were especially arresting. Laid out behind glass in a cabinet inside the Slave House, they sat there in silence, but with an unmistakable force, making the violence of enslavement feel at once intimate, material and historically inescapable. What struck me was the way something so still and contained could carry such weight. Behind the glass, they seemed almost ordinary as objects, and yet they were charged with the memory of bodies restrained, lives violated, and human beings reduced to cargo within a violent economic system.
In that moment, the abstraction of slavery gave way to something far more immediate. The shackles made clear that this history was not only about numbers, routes or systems of trade. It was also about iron on flesh, confinement on the body, and the deliberate organisation of dehumanisation. They condensed an enormous structure of violence into something painfully concrete. There was an image of Nelson Mandela among the materials, and that carried a personal and political resonance for me. His presence there connected the history of slavery and colonial extraction to another history of racial domination and struggle that is much closer to my own national experience. He stood, in that context, as a figure of dignity, resistance and unfinished justice.
The view approaching Gorée Island, outside Dakar.
A different register
And then there was the African Renaissance Monument in Dakar. That monument matters precisely because it introduces a different register. If Gorée speaks to injury and rupture, the monument speaks to aspiration, self-assertion and futurity. It is large, dramatic and unapologetic. It insists that Africa cannot be narrated only through suffering or dependency. It must also be understood through ambition, agency and the right to shape its own future.
Taken together, those Senegal images held a tension that stayed with me: memory and aspiration, injury and recovery, historical violence and political futurity. That tension is also present, in another form, in development finance. African institutions are asked to operate within systems shaped by long histories of unequal power, while also being expected to become agents of transformation, resilience and development.
That wider frame became more concrete in a meeting I attended with a Development Finance Institution in Senegal. What stood out most was the seriousness of the engagement. This was not a courtesy meeting or a generic exchange. It was clearly prepared for, and it brought together senior representation from several parts of the institution, including risk, communications, partnerships, human resources, training and institutional strategy. That breadth mattered. It signalled that the conversation was being understood as strategic and institution wide rather than narrow and technical.
The discussion moved across climate-finance readiness, project preparation, institutional systems, risk, capacity needs and possible pathways for collaboration. The tone was constructive, open and grounded. There was a willingness to ask difficult questions, but also a clear sense that the institution was thinking about these issues seriously and at multiple levels.
That meeting reinforced an important lesson. African DFIs are too often described in broad and flattening terms, as if they are all generically weak, underperforming or institutionally indistinct. But once one is actually in the room, what becomes visible is something far more textured: institutions trying to strengthen capability under difficult conditions, people thinking seriously about systems, people navigating developmental expectations and external scrutiny at the same time. Again, the lesson was not one of absence. It was one of institution building under constraint.
The African Renaissance Monument in Dakar.
Snakes and Ladders
By this stage of the trip, another part of my own work was becoming more defined in my mind: the argument of my second article on beyond bankability. The more I listened in Dakar, the more inadequate the standard language of bankability began to feel. It is not wrong. But it is incomplete. A project can be technically robust, policy-aligned and commercially structured, and still fail both to secure finance and to respond meaningfully to the needs of its intended communities.
The problem is not always the project. Often, it is the terrain within which the project is being judged. This is where the image of the game of Snakes and Ladders became useful to me. The ladders represent enabling factors: strong project preparation, guarantees, blended finance, clear policy support, credible governance, local-currency instruments, stronger utilities and offtakers. These are the conditions that help a project move from proposal towards actual finance access.
But the snakes represent the structural barriers that pull projects backwards: political instability, weak or volatile ratings, exchange-rate risk, sovereign ceilings, utility insolvency, shallow local capital markets, low institutional credibility, policy inconsistency. And then there are the venomous snakes: inherent bias towards Africa, and the perceived risk of debt default.
Risk is not judged only through objective project characteristics. It is also judged through broader market perceptions, historical bias and the positioning of African borrowers within the skewed global financial system. African sovereigns and institutions often face much higher costs of capital than borrowers in the Global North, even where projects are technically sound.
One country’s debt distress can spill over into regionalised suspicion about many others. Contagion, category effects and inherited mistrust shape how risk is priced. That is why so many apparently bankable projects fail to reach financial close or cannot secure climate finance on workable terms. The obstacle is often not the proposal itself, but the wider political financial environment. This, too, connected back to what I had been seeing in Dakar. The board is not level. Some borrowers begin the game with far more snakes than ladders.
One day in Paris
From Dakar I travelled to Paris. This mattered not only because of the city itself, but because Paris was the headquarters of the development finance institution whose team I was engaging with, and I was there specifically to meet with someone from its research unit. That gave the stop a particular significance. It brought the journey into direct contact with a major site of financial and intellectual influence.
Paris is visually impressive, of course. The city’s formal architecture, museums, gardens and urban order project authority, continuity and cultivated prestige. But arriving there from Dakar, it was impossible not to register something beyond surface beauty.
Paris represents concentration: of capital, of institutional power, of legitimacy, and of the research and policy frameworks through which development is often interpreted and governed. To meet with someone from a research unit there was to be reminded that categories, diagnostics and policy vocabularies are produced somewhere. They are shaped by institutions located in specific geographies of power.
This does not invalidate the work done there. But it does mean that the relationship between African institutions and European financial architectures cannot be treated as neutral. The contrast between Dakar and Paris is not only visual. It is structural. One moves between differently positioned locations in the making and management of the global economy.
A view of the entrance to the Louvre museum in Paris.
Clermont-Ferrand convergence
By the time I reached Clermont-Ferrand, the journey itself had already begun to clarify the paper I would present there. Several strands came together: Dakar’s discussions on debt and financial architecture, the institutional seriousness of the Senegal meeting, the historical force of Gorée Island, the practical lesson of the toaster, the sharper awareness of Paris as a site of financial and intellectual influence. All of these had become part of the context in which I would now present my work on market shaping.
The town itself provided an appropriate setting for that convergence. Distinctive, quieter than Paris, historically textured, and well suited to concentrated reflection. It felt like a place where ideas could be tested carefully. Presenting the paper there was meaningful precisely because the route had made the argument less abstract to me. I was no longer speaking only about African public development banks as institutional categories. I was speaking with the wider geography of Dakar, Gorée Island, Paris and the institutional realities I had encountered still very much in view.
The core claim of the paper was that African public development banks matter not only when they fill financing gaps, but when they shape transition systems. That market shaping is not a slogan but an institutional configuration. That just transition outcomes do not follow automatically from green investment. That project bankability is necessary, but not sufficient. That the real question is not only how much capital is mobilised, but what kind of transition that capital makes possible.
Here I kept returning, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, to two important intellectual anchors. Mazzucato’s insistence that the challenge is to move from filling gaps to shaping finance, and Stephany Griffith-Jones’ argument, in her discussion of KfW, that “such a catalytic role is precisely what a development bank should do to help kick-start structural transformation”. My own argument was aligned with both, but adapted to African contexts: market shaping is not merely catalytic intent. It is an institutional configuration in which capability, ecosystem coordination and justice orientation reinforce one another.
Moderating a panel at the same conference added another layer. Listening across papers on regional development banks, territorial finance and subnational institutional coordination, I kept hearing related themes: fragmentation, alignment, credibility, institutional trust, capital allocation, the politics of scale. These echoed the questions that had been building since Dakar, but from different vantage points.
There was also something valuable in the atmosphere of the conference itself. The generosity of the organising team, the seriousness of the engagement, and the quality of the discussions all mattered. Conferences are not only about the formal presentation of papers. They are also about whether a space is created in which thought can move, encounter, and sharpen others.
The charming streets of Clermont-Ferrand.
Reflections
Looking back, what remains most striking is not a single meeting, panel or presentation. It is the road itself. The road from Dakar to Clermont-Ferrand held together things that would usually remain separate: debt conference discussions and breakfast humour, Gorée Island and institutional meetings, a national DFI and a research unit in Paris, the history of slavery and the pricing of sovereign risk, academic exchange and the practical dignity of making a toaster work. That road made something clearer to me. Development finance is never merely technical. It is historical, institutional, political and moral all at once.
It also reminded me that some of the most important lessons about development are not always found first in formal frameworks. Sometimes they appear in the calm patience of a hotel manager who refuses to be defeated by a defective appliance. Sometimes they appear in an island that forces the modern economy to remember what it was built on. Sometimes they appear in the contrast between cities, and the unequal credibility that adheres to them.
And above all, the road made one question more pressing. The real issue is not only whether African institutions can be accommodated more fairly within existing financial architectures. The deeper issue is whether they can increasingly help shape those architectures, and shape developmental futures, on more grounded, just and autonomous terms. That is what the road to Clermont-Ferrand became. Not merely a journey. An argument.
Dr Ric Amansure is a senior researcher at CST.
Source: Stellenbosch – CST