The six layers

No single dataset covers African infrastructure. This consolidates six that complement each other: who is paying (African Development Bank 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) and where two decades of Chinese official finance went (AidData's Global Chinese Development Finance Dataset, commitments 2000–2021, with the works' footprints traced in OpenStreetMap).

They share no project identifier, so they are shown as six 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 match" 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 a year out
• Approved: GEM pre-construction; AfDB projects past board approval; AidData Pipeline: Commitment, a signed deal whose works have not started
• Under construction: GEM construction, IATI status 2, OSM construction, AidData Implementation, a planned cable due within a year
• Operating: GEM operating, IATI status 3–4, TeleGeography in service, AidData Completion
• Stalled: GEM cancelled/shelved/mothballed/idle, IATI 5–6, AidData Suspended/Cancelled

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 AfDB plus Chinese official finance, kept apart. AfDB commitments come from its transaction records (IATI type 2), converted from SDR at a fixed published rate. Chinese commitments are AidData's reconstruction from public sources, in constant 2021 dollars, and the two are never summed. Private, domestic-budget and other-lender finance is not here. Read totals as each lender's exposure, not as investment in Africa. The map view adds the World Bank.
• Chinese finance is a 2000–2021 baseline. AidData's 3.0 release ends with commitments made in 2021, so the layer says where Chinese money went, not what China is financing now. Only projects AidData flags as physical infrastructure are kept; pledges and umbrella agreements are left out; about a fifth of the records have no published location and sit at their country's centre, which the selection panel says.
• Roughly two-thirds of AfDB points are approximate. Locations flagged exactness=2 sit on a country or region centroid rather than on the works. The map uses an exact point where one exists and otherwise a marker near the country's centre. 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 within a year of 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 tracker exists for ports, water or electricity transmission, so those appear only where AfDB finances them or OSM mappers trace 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 and Western Sahara as polygons separate from Somalia and Morocco. That is the boundary dataset's cartographic choice, not a position taken here; works falling inside those outlines are attributed to them, which is why the territory count exceeds the 54 UN member states.