Africa needs capital, not charity, but Hassan Dakhlallah is building the case

As Western aid contracts, the case for Africa is increasingly being made in credit committees, not donor halls. The Ivorian founder of PORTEO Group has spent 15 years building a record of delivery.

At the end of March, nearly 700 delegates gathered at Abidjan’s Sofitel for a conversation about how to finance Africa’s future—not another donors’ conference. The European Union’s business forum on the Abidjan–Lagos and Abidjan–Ouagadougou corridors brought together representatives from six West African countries and eleven European ones. At a workshop on financing bankable infrastructure, participants returned to a familiar diagnosis: investors unfamiliar with local markets overestimate risk, raising the cost of finance.

The discussion was relevant to companies such as PORTEO Group, founded by Hassan Dakhlallah in Abidjan in 2011. The Guardian’s July profile described an entrepreneur whose approach combines the industrial integration associated with Aliko Dangote with the delivery standards of Julius Berger. His trajectory raises a larger question: can African businesses build the capacity and track record to attract capital on better terms?

The timing is significant. Bilateral aid to sub-Saharan Africa fell 26.3 per cent in 2025, according to preliminary OECD figures. Yet investment has not disappeared. Foreign companies put about $70 billion into Africa in 2025, the third-highest total since 1990, UNCTAD reported in July. The question is how the continent will finance its next phase of development, and at what cost.

The price of doubt

“Too often, Africa pays not for actual risk but for what I call a prejudice premium,” Samaila Zubairu, chief executive of the Lagos-based Africa Finance Corporation, said in London in July. African sovereigns, he argued, default less and recover more than many emerging-market borrowers—95 cents on the dollar on average—yet banking rules can favour lending to richer economies.

Infrastructure is difficult collateral. A completed road cannot simply be repossessed; it belongs to the country it serves. Lenders must assess the contractor’s balance sheet, equipment, supply chains and delivery record. Operating capacity becomes part of the investment case.

Dakhlallah has spent fifteen years building that capacity. On many public-private projects, PORTEO finances the works itself and is paid on delivery, carrying much of the risk until completion.

It has reinvested profits in machinery and industrial assets: its fleet grew from about 2,000 machines in 2024 to more than 3,000, largely owned. It also produces its own concrete through Technic Béton and steel through B. Steel. PORTEO’s revenue reached €737 million in 2025, according to figures Dakhlallah provided.

The model is being tested in Gabon. PORTEO is paving an approximately 300-kilometre stretch of the Transgabonaise, the last unpaved link between Libreville and Franceville. Financed under a June 2025 agreement with the Gabonese state and a regional lender, the €213 million project is Gabon’s longest road contract awarded to a single company. PORTEO is deploying its concrete, bitumen and aggregate facilities, with about 1,500 local jobs expected. A lender cannot take possession of the road; it can examine the contractor.

A record under scrutiny

PORTEO’s expansion has tested timing, geography and scale. It began in Côte d’Ivoire as the country emerged from the 2010–11 post-electoral crisis. In 2018, it entered Benin, doubled the Sèmè–Porto-Novo road and won further government projects.

The African Development Bank named Dakhlallah its Builder of the Year in 2024. Auditors certified the Ivorian business to three ISO standards between December 2025 and March 2026. Its next test is geographic: PORTEO has won a port contract in Tanzania and is in talks on a road under Ghana’s Big Push programme, but has yet to complete a project in an English-speaking country.

PORTEO has also faced online scrutiny. In October 2026, a website presenting itself as a financial-crime monitor published an unsigned “case analysis” of Dakhlallah. It named no author and cited no court filings, regulators or underlying documents. Similar pages targeted other African business and political figures. In October 2026, researchers at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies reported tracing the site (amlnetwork.[org]) to a network of at least eleven websites posing as watchdogs and news outlets, operated by a single actor.

The episode points to a wider due-diligence problem. By June 2026, NewsGuard had counted 3,749 websites it classified as AI content farms, across sixteen languages. Automated adverse-media screening can struggle to distinguish journalism from anonymous or templated material. The answer is not less scrutiny, but better evidence: identifiable sources, documents, corroboration and a right of reply.

Building beyond the contract

PORTEO says its workforce spans twenty-three nationalities across seven countries. An Ivorian leads its Gabon subsidiary, its group chief executive is Senegalese, and more than 200 local firms are in its supply chain. Government data is held in Abidjan and Libreville.

The plan is to triple revenue by 2030, reduce roads from about 90 per cent of activity to half, and expand from seven countries to ten to fifteen across ECOWAS and East Africa.

The strategy has precedents. Nigeria imported 5.1 million tonnes of foreign cement in 2011; by 2017, its government was describing the country as self-sufficient and an exporter, with Dangote’s plants central to the shift, according to industry reporting. 

Julius Berger, which arrived in Nigeria in 1965 to build the Eko Bridge, delivered the Third Mainland Bridge in 1990 and is now majority Nigerian-owned.

In August 2026, Tanzania inaugurated the 2,115-megawatt Julius Nyerere hydropower plant, built by an Egyptian consortium of Arab Contractors and Elsewedy Electric. Each illustrates the importance of technical capacity, supply chains and the ability to deliver complex infrastructure.

Europe’s opportunity

Europe has pledged to mobilise €150 billion for Africa through its Global Gateway programme. At the Abidjan forum, Sonia Toro of the EU-Africa Chamber of Commerce urged European businesses “to get closer to the ground, adapt, and break with history.” Lenders must assess local partners on evidence, not assumptions formed at a distance.

Dakhlallah’s argument is simple: “Africa should be judged on what it builds rather than on what it announces.” Both sides have responsibilities: African businesses must demonstrate transparency, financial discipline and execution; investors must develop the local knowledge to assess them fairly.

The gap between perceived and actual risk will narrow not through pledges, but through completed projects, stronger local suppliers and lenders who understand the businesses delivering them. PORTEO says it has built more than 3,000 kilometres of roads. That figure does not remove the risks of investing in African infrastructure. It does provide a record against which those risks can be judged.

Africa does not need capital without scrutiny. It needs capital that understands what it is financing, and businesses capable of showing, project by project, what that investment can deliver.