Founder
Most projects stall. Some get finished.
Twenty years on large projects showed what separates the two.
The work
Twenty years on the ground.
The training was computer engineering, then a master's in computational finance. The first work was real estate investment in the United States and Nigeria.
Since then it has been board and operating roles on large construction, infrastructure and real estate projects. That means planning a development, getting it permitted, building it, and keeping everyone around it working together for years.
I also co-founded a construction company that builds affordable housing with a low environmental footprint. Alongside that I have supported wildlife protection, large tree planting campaigns, clean water in West African communities, and microfinance for young entrepreneurs.
What the work teaches
Announcements are easy. Finishing is not.
Most projects die early.
They die before a single machine arrives. The money is not really committed. The permit sits with one office. The land title has a problem nobody wants to raise. From the outside it still looks like a project.
The blocker is rarely the headline.
A power plant is not usually stopped by its turbines. It is stopped by the line that carries the power away, or by who signs to buy it. You have to know which part of the chain is weak.
People decide the outcome.
A development involves a state, a lender, a builder, a regulator and the people who live next to it. They all have to keep moving in the same direction for years. That is the real job.
Numbers arrive late.
By the time a figure is published, the thing it describes has already happened. To see a shift early, you watch the parts that move first.
Why this exists
The work kept asking for a system.
Every project raised the same questions. What has this country actually built? Who paid for it? What changed since last year, and where did that number come from?
Answering them by hand took weeks, every time. So it was built into a system instead. It reads hundreds of thousands of data points across the nine forces, at country level and below, and marks what moved each time new figures come out.
The system came out of the operating work. Twenty years of building is what tells it which number matters. How we work
The Brief
Get Next Week's Opening.
- How big it is, in dollars.
- What has to be true for it to work.
- Who is placed to move first.
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