BuildMap: announced, approved and ongoing infrastructure in Africa
This page is an interactive map of infrastructure projects across Africa, built from thirteen public datasets:
4,295 power units tracked by Global Energy Monitor, 1,683 projects financed by the African Development Bank, 890 by the World Bank, 394 financings by the Agence française de développement (AFD) and 1,615 projects paid for by Germany's development ministry (BMZ) and carried out by GIZ, KfW and others, 3,700 construction works traced in OpenStreetMap, 323 oil and gas pipeline segments from Global Energy Monitor and 81 submarine cables landing in Africa from TeleGeography, plus 2,487 infrastructure projects financed by Chinese official lenders and agencies between 2000 and 2023, from AidData, and 2,008 infrastructure projects financed by the European Union's institutions, the European Commission and the European Investment Bank, via IATI, and the 76 projects of Italy's Piano Mattei per l'Africa as the Italian Government's portal lists them, and the 133 Global Gateway flagship projects the European Commission lists in Africa, which it publishes with no amount or stage. Together they describe about 1,094 GW of generating capacity across all statuses; USD 75.1 billion of AfDB commitments, converted at 1 SDR = 1.35 USD (IMF, 9 Oct 2026), USD 98.3 billion of World Bank commitments, USD 11.8 billion of AFD commitments and USD 16.5 billion of BMZ commitments, both converted at 1 EUR = 1.1206 USD (ECB reference rate, 9 Oct 2026), each the infrastructure share of the lender's own commitment, budget support and cancelled projects left out; USD 222.2 billion of Chinese official commitments to infrastructure over 2000–2023, in constant 2023 dollars as AidData publishes them; USD 30.1 billion of European Union commitments, Commission contracts and EIB loans, converted at 1 EUR = 1.1206 USD (ECB reference rate, 9 Oct 2026); EUR 4.39 billion of stated Piano Mattei project amounts, the figures the Italian Government's portal prints, which may include other funders' shares.
The page needs JavaScript to draw; without it, this summary, the data files below
and the dashboard view are what is here.
The sources share no project identifier, so they are kept as separate layers
and never added into one project cost: an AfDB-financed power plant can legitimately appear in several.
Each source's own lifecycle is mapped onto five shared statuses: announced, approved,
under construction, operating and stalled.
The layers in this snapshot
| Source | Dataset | Records | Licence | Data as of | Download |
|---|
| Global Energy Monitor | Global Integrated Power Tracker, release 2026-09 | 4,295 | CC BY 4.0 | 24 Sep 2026 | GeoJSON |
| African Development Bank | IATI 2.03 activity files, 57 datasets (country, multinational and non-sovereign files) | 1,683 | CC BY (per the IATI Registry) | 14 Oct 2026 | GeoJSON |
| World Bank | IATI 2.03 activity files, 52 African country and regional datasets | 890 | CC BY 4.0 | 14 Oct 2026 | GeoJSON |
| Agence française de développement | IATI 2.03 activity files, 44 African country datasets (the financings under each project) | 394 | Licence Ouverte / Open Licence | 22 Oct 2026 | GeoJSON |
| BMZ (German development ministry) | IATI 2.03 activity files, 50 African country datasets (every project BMZ pays for, with the agency that carries it out: GIZ, KfW or another) | 1,615 | CC BY (per the IATI Registry) | 22 Oct 2026 | GeoJSON |
| OpenStreetMap | Overpass API, significant road/rail/air classes | 3,700 | ODbL 1.0 | 14 Oct 2026 | GeoJSON |
| Global Energy Monitor | Global Gas and Global Oil Infrastructure Trackers, map files GGIT 2025-11 · GOIT 2026-07 | 323 | CC BY 4.0 | 19 Mar 2026 | GeoJSON |
| TeleGeography | Submarine Cable Map, cables with an African landing point | 81 | © TeleGeography (map CC BY-SA 4.0) | 14 Oct 2026 | at the source |
| AidData | CLG-Global 1.0 · locations from GCDF 3.0 and GeoGCDF v3.0.1, official commitments to infrastructure 2000–2023, footprints from OpenStreetMap | 2,487 | ODC-By 1.0 (footprints ODbL) | Nov 2025 · to 2023 | GeoJSON |
| European Union | IATI 2.03 activity files of the European Commission (DG INTPA and DG NEAR, 61 African country and regional datasets) and the European Investment Bank's global file (IATI 2.02) | 2,008 | CC BY 4.0 (Commission), attribution (EIB) | 30 Jan 2025 | GeoJSON |
| Italian Government | Piano Mattei per l'Africa project portal (Presidency of the Council of Ministers), one page per project, read in its Italian and English versions | 76 | CC BY 3.0 IT (gazetteer ODbL) | 14 Oct 2026 | GeoJSON |
| European Commission, Global Gateway | Global Gateway flagship projects: the data file behind the map on the Commission's Global Gateway page and each flagship's page (countries, area of partnership, Team Europe members, milestones); the Commission publishes no amount or stage | 133 | CC BY 4.0 | 24 Oct 2026 | GeoJSON |
Limits: money is two multilateral lenders, AfDB and the World Bank, the European Union's
institutions (the Commission's contracts and the EIB's loans, as each publishes them to IATI),
Chinese official finance as AidData reconstructs it from public sources, and the amounts Italy's
Piano Mattei portal states for its projects, which may be a whole project's value rather than
Italy's share; the Chinese layer ends with commitments made in 2023, so totals are each lender's
exposure, kept on lines of their own, and not investment in Africa; about 42%
of AfDB locations are approximate, a named town or a country or region centroid, the World Bank marks every location approximate, the EIB and the
Piano Mattei portal publish no locations at all, so their records sit on a place the record names
or at their country's point, and about 24% of the Chinese-financed
projects have no published location and sit at their country's centre; OpenStreetMap presence is mapper-driven,
so absence is not evidence; energy and connectivity are over-represented because no comparable
open project tracker exists for ports, water or electricity transmission.
The compiled payload is data/map.json; fetch dates and
release names are in data/meta.json. A plain-text summary
for language models is at llms.txt.
Country outlines: Natural Earth. Built 28 Oct 2026 by
Jacopo Ottaviani.