The nine layers

No single dataset covers African infrastructure. This consolidates thirteen public datasets, in nine layers that complement each other: who is paying (the African Development Bank's and the World Bank's activity files), what asset is being built (Global Energy Monitor's power tracker), what has physically broken ground (OpenStreetMap construction tags), where oil and gas move (Global Energy Monitor's pipeline trackers), where the continent's bandwidth comes ashore (TeleGeography's Submarine Cable Map), where two decades of Chinese official finance went (AidData's China's Global Loans and Grants Dataset, commitments 2000–2023, with the works' footprints traced in OpenStreetMap) where the European Union's own money goes (the European Commission's contracts and the European Investment Bank's operations, from their IATI activity files) and what Italy's Piano Mattei has put on the map (the Italian Government's project portal, one page per project), with the projects the EU puts forward as Global Gateway flagships beside them (the European Commission's own list, which gives no amount or stage).

They share no project identifier, so they are shown as nine map layers over a common country spine rather than merged into one table of "projects". Counting across layers would double-count: an AfDB-financed power plant can legitimately appear in several. The "records" figure is a count of rows across the active layers, not of projects.

One status vocabulary

Each source's own lifecycle is mapped onto five shared values:

• Announced: GEM announced (power) or proposed (pipelines), IATI status 1, OSM proposed, a TeleGeography planned cable due later than the year after the snapshot, a Piano Mattei project the portal marks identified or formulated
• Approved: GEM pre-construction, a project still seeking permits, land or finance; an AfDB activity still marked pipeline (IATI status 1) whose commitment is on record, so past board approval; AidData Pipeline: Commitment, a signed deal whose works have not started; a Piano Mattei project the portal marks approved. The World Bank and the EU institutions publish no such stage.
• Under construction: GEM construction, IATI status 2, OSM construction, AidData Implementation, a planned cable due by the end of the year after the snapshot, a Piano Mattei project marked ongoing
• Operating: GEM operating, IATI status 3–4, TeleGeography in service, AidData Completion, a Piano Mattei project marked completed
• Stalled: GEM cancelled/shelved/mothballed/idle, IATI 5–6, AidData Suspended/Cancelled. A stalled record is drawn, but its money is not counted.

Dashed lines are routes not yet built. A hollow mark is a stalled record. With Cluster markers on, records that would overlap at the current zoom are grouped into a donut sized by count and sliced by status; click one to zoom in. Pipelines and cables are routes, so they stay drawn as lines.

Limits of the data

• Money is five lenders and one government plan, kept apart. AfDB commitments come from its transaction records (IATI type 2), converted from SDR at a fixed published rate; the World Bank's are in US dollars as published; AFD's, France's development agency, are in euros, converted at a fixed published rate; the European Commission's and the EIB's are in euros, converted at a fixed published rate; Chinese commitments are AidData's reconstruction from public sources, in constant 2023 dollars. Each is counted as the lender's own infrastructure share, budget support, a borrower's counterpart funds and cancelled projects left out, and each is shown on its own line, never added to another. Private, domestic-budget, other EU member states' and other-lender finance is not here. Read totals as each lender's exposure, not as investment in Africa.
• The Global Gateway layer is a list, not money. One record is one flagship on the European Commission's list, read from the data file behind the map on its Global Gateway page and from the flagship's page. The Commission publishes no amount and no stage, so the layer adds to no total and shows only while every stage is selected; a flagship sits at its country's point, or, for several countries or none, at the Commission's Africa-wide point, in Chad.
• The Piano Mattei layer is a government's own list. One record is one page of the Italian Government's project portal, the whole plan as published, training and culture included; the amount is the figure the portal prints, which may be the whole project's value or Italy's share, and is never added to the lenders' commitments. The portal gives no coordinates: a record sits on the place its description names, at the country's point, or, for a programme across several countries, at one Africa-wide point. The selection panel says which.
• Chinese finance is a 2000–2023 baseline. AidData's China's Global Loans and Grants Dataset 1.0 ends with commitments made in 2023, so the layer says where Chinese money went, not what China is financing now. Only projects AidData flags as physical infrastructure are kept, including loans it marks commodity-backed; pledges, umbrella agreements and loans that buy a stake are left out. The release publishes no locations: a record carried over from AidData's previous release (GCDF 3.0) keeps the location and footprint published for it there, and about a fifth of the records, the ones new in this release among them, sit at their country's centre, which the selection panel says.
• EU finance is two institutions' own share. One record is a Commission contract (a financing decision only while nothing under it is contracted, and once however many countries' files repeat it, so no envelope is counted twice) or an EIB operation, the Bank's own loans and direct equity; its fund investments, credit lines and the grants it manages for the Commission are left out. The Commission places a record on a named place or on its default point for the country; the EIB publishes no locations, so its operations sit at the country's point; Africa-wide programmes sit at the Commission's regional point, in Chad. Guarantees and the member states' agencies, which carry much of "Team Europe", are absent.
• About two fifths of AfDB points are approximate. Locations flagged exactness=2 sit on a named town, often the capital, or on a country or region centroid rather than on the works. The map uses an exact point where one exists and otherwise the place the Bank names. The table shows which.
• OSM presence is mapper-driven. Absence of a road here is not evidence no road is being built. It is also filtered to significant classes, motorway to secondary roads plus all rail and airport works, because an unfiltered query is dominated by residential street stubs inside housing estates.
• Pipeline routes are indicative, as published by Global Energy Monitor, and one pipeline can be several segments, each its own record. A segment is filed under the first country on its route; the country filter matches every country it crosses.
• A cable's status is partly inferred. TeleGeography says only planned or in service; "under construction" here means planned and due no later than the year after the snapshot. Routes are drawn where they run around Africa and cut where they leave for Europe, Asia or the Americas; the dots are African landing points.
• Energy and connectivity are over-represented. GEM and TeleGeography cover their fields comprehensively; no comparable open project tracker exists for ports, water or electricity transmission, so those appear only where a lender in these layers finances them.

Provenance

African country outlines are Natural Earth 1:110m. Cabo Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, Comoros, Mauritius and Seychelles are below that resolution and are drawn as markers, so their projects sit on a marker rather than a coastline.. The rest of the world is drawn too, as grey context from Natural Earth 1:10m simplified hard, so the map can be zoomed out to the whole world and a cable heading for Europe or India ends on a coast; only African countries can be selected. The projection is plain equirectangular: undistorted near the equator, which is where most of this continent sits, and progressively stretched north and south.

Natural Earth draws Somaliland as a polygon separate from Somalia, and splits Western Sahara at the Moroccan berm: the part Morocco administers lies inside Morocco's shape. That is the boundary dataset's cartographic choice, not a position taken here; works placed by their coordinates follow those outlines, while power units follow Global Energy Monitor's own country field. With Mayotte, Réunion and Saint Helena, which only submarine cables reach, that is why the territory count exceeds Africa's 54 UN member states (the African Union has 55 members, the Sahrawi Republic among them).