Between an idea and a bankable project lies a stage almost no one will fund. It is where the best real-economy projects in South Africa go to stall — and where the right capital does its most valuable work.
A project developer has land, a signed offtake, and the outline of a sound venture — a farm to expand, an agri-processing plant to build, a renewable installation to develop. What they do not yet have is a project a bank will lend against. The feasibility must be finished, the permits secured, the offtake firmed, the engineering costed. Only then does a project become "bankable" — and only then does conventional project finance appear.
The distance between those two points is the development stage. It is short in a pitch deck and long in reality, and it is where good projects quietly die.
The valley no one crosses for you
The development stage is orphaned because it fits no one's mandate. It is past the point where a grant or a founder's own savings can carry it, and before the point where a bank's project-finance desk will engage. Equity funds want a de-risked asset. Lenders want a bankable one. The developer is left to fund the very work that would produce the thing everyone is waiting for.
So the project stalls — not because it is unsound, but because the stage that makes it sound is the stage no one will pay for. The land sits. The permits lapse. The offtake counterparty moves on. A viable venture is lost in the gap between an idea and a fundable project.
What development capital has to do
Funding the development stage is not the same as funding a finished project, and it can't be underwritten as if it were. There is no completed asset to secure against and no steady cash flow to service a loan. What there is, instead, is a sequence of milestones — each one that is reached making the project materially more valuable and materially less risky than it was before.
Development capital has to be structured around that sequence. It is released against defined milestones, not drawn down in a lump; it is priced to the risk of the stage it is funding, not to a finished asset; and it comes with hands-on support through the work — feasibility, permitting, structuring, and the discipline of getting a project to a standard institutional lenders will recognise. The capital and the capability arrive together, because at this stage neither is useful without the other.
From land to bankability
Done properly, development funding carries a project across the valley — from land, permits, and an offtake to a fully structured, bankable proposition that conventional finance can take forward. The value is created precisely in the crossing. A developer who reaches bankability has an asset worth financing; a developer stranded before it has a cost.
This is the work behind our capital project financing, delivered through the AgriShare platform: development funding for productive real-economy projects — agriculture and agri-processing, renewable energy, mineral and land-based ventures, and the infrastructure that supports them — structured around milestones, with the hands-on support to reach each one. We fund the stage everyone else waits out, because it is the stage where the project is actually made.
