NEPAD · Infrastructure Project Preparation Facility

In August and September 2020 I worked as digital marketing expert for NEPAD's Infrastructure Project Preparation Facility. It was a short, defined assignment: an institution brought in an outside expert for a precise digital marketing need and a fixed window.

The facility's name states its function. It prepares infrastructure projects. Its work happens before anything is built, in studies, financing structures and agreements between institutions. There is no ribbon to cut and no product to photograph.

That is what makes digital marketing hard here. The audience is not a consumer. It is governments, regional bodies, financiers and partners who decide slowly and read carefully. The value is real but abstract: a road, a power line or a port that exists later partly because someone prepared it well now.

I approach that kind of brief the same way each time. Find what the institution actually does that others cannot. Name who needs to understand it and what they need to see to act. Then make the abstract concrete enough to be shared, without inflating it into promises the institution cannot sign.

A two-month assignment leaves no room for a long discovery phase. The first weeks decide whether the work lands. I start from what the institution already has: its mandate, its published material, its existing channels and the people who run them.

Those people matter most, because they keep publishing after the expert leaves. A short assignment is only useful if what it produces can be carried by the team that remains, in their own working rhythm, without me in the room.

In infrastructure, the communication that matters happens years before any opening ceremony, while financing and political commitment are still being assembled. That is the moment the facility works in, and the moment its digital presence had to serve.

The assignment fell in 2020, between my UNIDO years in Marrakech and the UNIDO women's empowerment programme that started that October, the same year as the OIF entrepreneur series. It extended the institutional work into a new field: development finance and African infrastructure, where the communication problem is legibility rather than visibility.