Africa Infra Watch: announced, approved and ongoing infrastructure in Africa
This page is an interactive map of infrastructure projects across Africa, built from seven open datasets:
4,274 power units tracked by Global Energy Monitor, 1,767 projects financed by the African Development Bank and 1,107 by the World Bank, 3,586 construction works traced in OpenStreetMap, 324 oil and gas pipeline segments from Global Energy Monitor and 81 submarine cables landing in Africa from TeleGeography, plus 2,324 infrastructure projects financed by Chinese official lenders and agencies between 2000 and 2021, from AidData. Together they describe about 1,090 GW of generating capacity across all statuses; USD 101.5 billion of AfDB commitments, converted at 1 SDR = 1.37 USD (IMF, Sep 2026), and USD 179.3 billion of World Bank commitments as published; USD 242.7 billion of Chinese official commitments to infrastructure over 2000–2021, in constant 2021 dollars as AidData publishes them.
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 are never added up: 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 2026-08-v2 | 4,274 | CC BY 4.0 | 24 Aug 2026 | GeoJSON |
| African Development Bank | IATI 2.03 activity files, 57 country datasets | 1,767 | Open, per publisher | 18 Sep 2026 | GeoJSON |
| World Bank | IATI 2.03 activity files, 52 African country and regional datasets | 1,107 | CC BY 4.0 | 18 Sep 2026 | GeoJSON |
| OpenStreetMap | Overpass API, significant road/rail/air classes | 3,586 | ODbL 1.0 | 7 Sep 2026 | GeoJSON |
| Global Energy Monitor | Global Gas and Global Oil Infrastructure Trackers, releases GGIT 2025-11 · GOIT 2026-07 | 324 | CC BY 4.0 | 18 Sep 2026 | GeoJSON |
| TeleGeography | Submarine Cable Map, cables with an African landing point | 81 | CC BY-SA 4.0 | 18 Sep 2026 | GeoJSON |
| AidData | GCDF 3.0 · GeoGCDF v3.0.1, official commitments to infrastructure 2000–2021, footprints from OpenStreetMap | 2,324 | ODC-By 1.0 (footprints ODbL) | Nov 2023 · to 2021 | GeoJSON |
Limits: money is two multilateral lenders, AfDB and the World Bank, plus Chinese official
finance as AidData reconstructs it from public sources, and the Chinese layer ends with
commitments made in 2021, so totals are those lenders' exposure, not investment in Africa;
about two thirds of AfDB locations sit on a country or region centroid, the World Bank marks
every location approximate, and about a quarter 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 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 19 Sep 2026 by
Jacopo Ottaviani.