Financing skills like infrastructure: The next frontier for Africa’s development capital

Africa is investing heavily in infrastructure. Across the continent, governments, development finance institutions, private investors, and sovereign funds are financing power plants, transmission networks, industrial parks, transport corridors, refineries, ports, data centres, and renewable energy projects. Discussions about infrastructure financing have become increasingly sophisticated. We debate blended finance, project preparation facilities, public-private partnerships, sovereign guarantees, local currency financing, and the role of institutional capital in closing Africa’s infrastructure gap.

Yet listening to the richly convened discussions at a recent Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) summit in Lagos, meticulously organised by GIZ and the Lagos State government, with support from development partners including Switzerland and Germany, I found myself thinking about a question that rarely appears in investment memoranda: what and who will keep these assets working 20 years from now? Not who will finance them. Not who will build them. Who will operate them, maintain them, troubleshoot them, upgrade them, and eventually replace them?

The question may sound obvious. Yet it sits at the centre of one of the most overlooked development challenges facing many African economies today. We have become increasingly effective at discussing how to finance infrastructure. We have been far less deliberate about financing the development of skills and competences required to sustain it.

A modern refinery may represent billions of dollars of investment. Yet its long-term performance depends on hundreds of less visible decisions made every day by control-room operators, instrumentation specialists, reliability engineers, welders, inspectors, planners, and maintenance technicians. When those capabilities are absent, performance deteriorates long before the physical asset reaches the end of its design life.

The same principle applies to electricity infrastructure. A transmission line can be financed, engineered, and constructed within a few years. Maintaining its reliability is a decades-long exercise of capabilities in specialised skill sets and competencies. Every transformer maintained, every protection system evaluated, every fault restored, and every outage investigated depends on skills that cannot be imported indefinitely. The same reality is emerging across manufacturing, logistics, renewable energy, mining, telecommunications, and industrial processing. Infrastructure ultimately works because people make it work.

For decades, development policy has tended to treat infrastructure investment and workforce development as separate conversations. Infrastructure attracts investors; skills attract donors. Infrastructure is discussed in ministries of finance; skills are discussed in ministries of education. Infrastructure is viewed as an investment; skills are often viewed as a social programme. Yet economic progress occurs where the two intersect. Capital without capability produces underperforming assets. Capability without capital produces underutilised talent.

This distinction matters because Africa’s development challenge is evolving. For years, the continent’s infrastructure gap was primarily viewed as a financing problem. That remains partly true. Many countries still require substantial investment in power, transportation, water, digital connectivity, and industrial infrastructure. But increasingly, the challenge is becoming one of productive capabilities. As economies industrialise, urbanise, digitise, and modernise, the demand for technical skills is growing faster than the systems designed to produce them.

Encouragingly, the discussion is becoming more data-driven. At the Lagos summit, UNESCO highlighted the completion of an assessment covering more than three hundred (300) science and technical colleges across Nigeria. The exercise reflects growing recognition that workforce capability deserves the same rigour, measurement, and planning discipline that governments increasingly apply to physical infrastructure.

The financing challenge is hardly theoretical. Discussions at the summit also highlighted estimates that Nigeria currently spends roughly 1.2 per cent of GDP on education, far below levels commonly recommended for emerging economies (i.e., 4%-6%), creating an estimated financing gap measured in trillions of naira. Yet the more important question may not be how much is spent but how it is spent. If workforce capability is central to industrial competitiveness, then technical education, apprenticeships, competency centres, and industry-linked training should increasingly be viewed as productive investments rather than residual after-thought social expenditures.

This is particularly evident in the energy sector. Across Africa, governments are pursuing ambitious plans to expand electricity access, strengthen transmission networks, modernise grids, and integrate renewable energy. These investments are essential. But every substation, every transmission line, every control system, and every grid modernisation project ultimately depend on skilled people.

The workforce is not adjacent to the infrastructure. The workforce is embedded, critical and indispensable within it. The same can be said of industrialisation. Across the continent, billions of dollars are being committed to manufacturing facilities, processing plants, industrial zones, logistics platforms, and large-scale industrial projects. Yet many eventually confront the same question: Where will the technicians come from? Where will the operators come from? Where will the maintenance specialists come from? Capital is often easier to mobilise than capability.

The energy transition reinforces this reality. Much of today’s discussion focuses on climate finance, renewable energy targets, emissions reductions, and green industrialisation. These are important objectives. But regardless of how quickly the transition unfolds, some realities remain constant. Solar systems must be installed. Battery systems must be maintained. Electric networks must be serviced. Waste management facilities must be operated. Industrial equipment must be repaired. Ambition may be written in policy documents. Execution happens in workshops, substations, factories, and field locations.

One of the more interesting themes that emerged during the Lagos summit was the growing recognition that skills development cannot be treated as an afterthought to economic planning. Participants repeatedly emphasised that green jobs, advanced technical trades, renewable energy, and industrial services are becoming central to future competitiveness. Equally important was the recognition that training alone is not enough. Industries capable of absorbing skilled workers must grow alongside workforce development efforts. Skills and investment are complementary. Neither achieves its full value without the other.

This raises an important question for policymakers, investors, and development institutions. Why do we finance physical infrastructure and workforce capability through entirely different lenses? When financing a road, a power project, or an industrial facility, investors evaluate long-term demand, economic benefits, governance structures, operating models, and sustainability. Yet the workforce required to sustain those investments is often treated as a secondary consideration. The result is predictable. We finance assets. Then scramble to find the people required to operate them. It is time we rethink that approach.

Technical colleges, apprenticeship systems, competency centres, certification frameworks, and industry-linked training institutions are often viewed as educational expenditures. Increasingly, they should be viewed as productive economic assets. Like infrastructure, they require long-term investment and effective governance. Like infrastructure, they generate economic returns or deteriorate when neglected. The countries that will lead the next phase of African industrialisation may not necessarily be those that build the most infrastructure. They may be those that build the strongest connection between infrastructure investment and human capability.

For policymakers, this requires a shift in perspective. Workforce development cannot remain solely an education-sector concern. It is an industrial policy issue, an energy-sector issue, a competitiveness issue, and increasingly an infrastructure issue. Countries that align infrastructure investment with capability development will enjoy a significant advantage over those that treat the two separately.

For investors and development finance institutions, the challenge is equally clear. Projects are routinely assessed for their financial, environmental, and developmental impact. The next frontier may be evaluating whether they also strengthen the local capability required to sustain long-term performance.

For infrastructure developers and industrial operators, workforce capability should be viewed as a core project input rather than an external dependency. Assets and capability must be developed together.

Africa has spent decades discussing how to finance roads, ports, power plants, transmission networks, and industrial parks. The next focus should include learning how to finance the capability required to sustain them. Physical assets remain essential. But assets alone do not create economic value. Their performance ultimately depends on the people who operate them. The countries that understand this relationship earliest will likely discover that the most important infrastructure investment is not always the asset itself. It is the capability that allows the asset to remain productive long after construction is complete. Steel, concrete, and capital build assets. Capability turns those assets into economic growth.

Dr Lazarus Angbazo is managing director/CEO of InfraCorp, Nigeria’s dedicated infrastructure investment platform focused on capital mobilisation, private institutional investment, and local capability development across critical infrastructure sectors. He also serves as non-executive chairman of Emerald Industrial Co., bringing practical operating experience across Nigeria’s power, oil & gas, and industrial sectors. [email protected]