Meet Africa's $7 billion infrastructure architect: Rachel Moré-Oshodi builds roads, grids, and legacies

Business Insider

2 days ago

Rachel Moré-Oshodi grew up knowing how systems fail and who they fail first. Now CEO of ARM-Harith, she has helped deliver over $7 billion in transformative projects across Africa, proving that capital can serve both profit and purpose.
Rachel Moré-Oshodi is the CEO of ARM-Harith Infrastructure Investments, managing over $7 billion in transformative projects across Africa.
Growing up between Europe and Africa, she witnessed disparities in infrastructure and opportunities, shaping her ambition to address these disparities.
With a career spanning organizations like the Inter-American Development Bank and IFC, she's brought global expertise to African infrastructure development.
Rachel Moré-Oshodi's childhood was a patchwork of time zones. She grew up travelling between continents, Europe and Africa, crossing oceans with the ease of a diplomat's child, because her father's work took the family to some of the world's most developed nations.
She has lived in cities where water flowed at the twist of a tap, where roads were smooth, power was constant, and education felt like a given. In these places, comfort wore the garb of normalcy.
But each time she returned home to Nigeria, she was met with a different kind of truth. There were children her age with bright minds, but who didn't have the same access to resources or opportunities.
This contrast was more than personal, it was structural. Nigeria is Africa's most populous country and its fourth-largest economy, but its infrastructure, like much of the continent's, remains severely underdeveloped.
The African Development Bank estimates that the continent's infrastructure needs range between $130 billion and $170 billion annually. But the real cost is less visible, etched in missed opportunities and muted futures. This gap, they say, shaves 2% off Africa's GDP every year.
For Moré-Oshodi, the weight of that reality hit early, visible not just in data, but in the streets she walked and the lives she passed.
'It created a kind of guilt in me,' Moré-Oshodi said. 'I saw what I had, and what others didn't. And I couldn't unsee it.'
That discomfort became a compass. She found herself drawn to the invisible pillars that shape society, macroeconomics, public policy, and development. She wanted to understand why some systems held together while others fell apart.
Bricks without blueprints
Now, with over 20 years of experience transforming Africa's energy and infrastructure sectors, Moré-Oshodi has become a seasoned leader in infrastructure finance and sustainable development. Her leadership has shaped over $7 billion in transformative projects across energy, transport and digital sectors.
But the path to that impact was shaped by global exposure. Over the course of her career, she has held strategic roles at institutions such as the Inter-American Development Bank, the International Finance Corporation, Rand Merchant Bank, and TotalEnergies, and has since translated these experiences into local impact.
At the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, for instance, she joined a team focused on expanding infrastructure access across Latin America and the Caribbean.
It was her first real immersion into the inner workings of development finance. But what struck her wasn't just the similarity in challenges. It was the difference in how they were addressed.
'It was an eye-opener,' she says. ' I saw how intentional, well-structured capital could truly change outcomes. That exposure made it clear to me that Africa deserved no less. '
When she returned to Nigeria to lead ARM-Harith Infrastructure Investments, she was not returning as a stranger. She was coming home with questions she now knew how to answer. Her mandate was clear: make African infrastructure bankable, not just aspirational.
As CEO of ARM-Harith, she now mobilises capital to deliver climate-smart, inclusive infrastructure across the continent.
" So across all my roles, the goal has been the same: to unlock capital and create practical solutions that move the continent forward, on its own terms. I've just approached that goal through different doors. But the mission has always been the same," she said.
Taking the high road home
But her journey was far from linear. In 2012, she made the bold decision to move back to Nigeria. At the time, she had every opportunity to remain in the U.S. or relocate to global hubs like London or Dubai.
She walked away from what others would have considered dream roles, high-profile, high-paying, high-prestige. ' I've left very comfortable jobs,' she said, 'because I couldn't reconcile the work with the impact I wanted to have.' Almost everyone around her warned against it.
'People still say, 'If you'd stayed abroad, you'd be way ahead in your career by now.' And maybe they're right. Maybe I'd be sitting in some corner office in London or New York. But I've never regretted coming back. Not once.'
When asked which infrastructure deal stood out the most in a career that has helped finance over $7 billion worth of projects across Africa, she likens the question to asking a mother to choose her favourite child.
'Almost every project has been complex in its way, ' she said. 'Infrastructure in Africa is never straightforward, especially when you're trying to build what hasn't been done before. Many of the projects I've worked on were first-of-their-kind, with no blueprint to follow.'
But if she had to choose just one that captures the challenge, and the promise, it would be the Azura-Edo Independent Power Project in Nigeria.
Electricity has long stood as a stumbling block to Nigeria's progress. While over 600 million people across Africa live without access to electricity, Nigeria's energy crisis is especially acute. More than 85 million Nigerians, over 40% of the population, live in darkness.
Azura-Edo was designed to shift that reality. The 450-megawatt power plant was the first privately-financed power project executed in Nigeria after the country's power sector reforms and privatisation. Before Azura, nothing like it had been done under the new regulatory environment.
According to Moré-Oshodi, what made the Azura-Edo project truly complex wasn't the engineering, it was the choreography of stakeholders required to bring it to life.
Nigerian regulators, local pension and insurance funds, and financiers from Sweden, the UK, France, and Germany all came to the table, each with distinct fears, risk appetites, and operating styles. ' We had to align all of that,' she recalls, 'to get the deal across the line.'
The project took eight years to complete. ' My children were born during that time. My family and friends knew every detail of the project because it became a part of my daily life. It was also the first major project I took on after moving back to Nigeria in 2012, so it carried deep personal significance. '
Africa's risky business? Think again
Speaking of perception, one of the biggest misconceptions about investing in African infrastructure is the notion of risk. ' Don't get me wrong,' she says, ' it is risky. But those of us who've worked here long enough know how to solve for those risks. '
She argues that the assets that do get structured and delivered in Africa are some of the most rigorously de-risked and well-thought-out anywhere in the world.
'It's not even a matter of opinion; the data backs it up. Infrastructure assets that are successfully built in Africa have the lowest non-performing asset rates globally. Lower than Latin America. Lower than Asia.'
Why? She stressed that global investors don't take anything for granted when they come to Africa. They demand more. They want every risk identified, analysed, mitigated, and managed before they even consider writing a cheque. So by the time a project gets funded and delivered here, it's already been through the wringer.
New roads for old money
Despite this track record, one of Africa's largest sources of capital still watches from the sidelines, its pension funds, cautious and unconvinced.
According to the Africa Finance Corporation, the continent holds $4 trillion in domestic capital that could help bridge its infrastructure gap, of which about $455 billion sits in pension funds.
But instead of flowing into roads, power plants, and ports, much of this capital remains idle, held back by concerns over political risk, regulatory uncertainty, and the long, slow burn of infrastructure returns.
Moré-Oshodi remembers those early conversations with pension fund managers vividly. ' Their worry was clear: ' We give you money now, and see nothing for three to five years? No returns? No liquidity?' It was a valid concern.
Pension funds need cash flow, retirees expect payments, contributors come and go, and liquidity is king. Locking up capital for years, even for good long-term gain, just didn't sit right.
So, they partnered with a FSD Afric o create something new, a model that offers pension funds early distributions, even before the project is completed.
'It's a form of financial innovation that hadn't been done here before, ' she explains. ' The idea was simple. Give pension funds a way to earn returns during the construction phase, not just years later. '
Now, funds that once shunned infrastructure are joining in, with confidence. ' This is what true partnership looks like,' she adds, ' global ideas grounded in local realities.'
Women at the helm, roads at their feet
Partnership, after all, is not just a matter of capital, it's a matter of trust. And trust, like power, has too often been kept behind closed doors where women weren't invited, let alone expected to lead.
The infrastructure space has long been considered a man's world. Or at least, that's the impression you get when you step into boardrooms or onto construction sites across Africa.
Cement. Steel. Finance. These are industries where women are more often absent than represented, especially at the top.
Yet Moré-Oshodi is flipping the old pages of stereotype, writing in margins that once excluded women. She's been named one of Forbes Africa's 50 Most Powerful Women, spotlighted by Fast Company as one of its Most Creative People in Business, and celebrated in GQ South Africa as a Woman Changing the Continent.
But beyond the accolades, she's part of a new wave of women who aren't just helping to build Africa's infrastructure but also reshaping who gets to lead those conversations.
' The question isn't whether African women deserve to be at the table. The question is why we're still asking that,' she says.