What Managing DFI-Funded Infrastructure Teaches You About EU Programme Delivery

There is a particular kind of pressure that comes with sitting across the table from an AFREXIM Bank appraisal team with $40 million in infrastructure funding on the line. The documentation has to be right. The risk model has to hold. The stakeholder map has to be accurate. There is no tolerance for governance theatre — no room for frameworks that look comprehensive in a slide deck but collapse under scrutiny.

I spent five years in that pressure. And when I look at what EU programme implementing organisations actually need from their programme managers, I see more overlap than most people expect.

What transfers directly

Rigorous accountability to funders. DFI-funded projects live and die by their accountability structures. Development finance institutions — AFREXIM, the African Development Bank, IFC — have sophisticated appraisal frameworks, and they expect implementing partners to maintain governance discipline throughout the programme lifecycle, not just at approval stage. EU programmes operate under similarly rigorous accountability logic: to the European Commission, to national authorities, to beneficiary governments. The instinct to build accountability systems that survive external scrutiny, rather than ones that look good internally, is the same.

Multi-stakeholder alignment as a core programme function. A cross-border infrastructure feasibility study in West Africa might involve the host government, a private infrastructure operator, a DFI co-financier, a local bank providing guarantees, and a development consultancy coordinating across all of them. Each party has different risk tolerances, different reporting requirements, and different political constraints. Getting them aligned on a single project narrative — without misrepresenting any party's position to the others — is a specific governance skill. EU programmes, particularly those operating across multiple beneficiary countries, require exactly this.

The discipline of programme governance under resource constraint. In a Lagos consulting environment, you build governance frameworks with lean teams and limited administrative support. You learn to prioritise ruthlessly: which information the decision-makers actually need, which reporting cadences are genuinely useful versus ceremonially required, and how to design accountability systems that add value rather than just adding overhead. This is directly applicable to implementing organisations managing EU-funded programmes where programme management resources are always stretched relative to programme complexity.

What doesn't transfer without adaptation

Procurement logic is fundamentally different. DFI procurement frameworks, while rigorous, are considerably more flexible than EU public procurement rules. The level of procedural specificity required under EU procurement — particularly for contracts above threshold values — is qualitatively different from anything I navigated in African DFI contexts. This is one of the specific gaps I am addressing through the MA EU Studies programme at FH Burgenland. Understanding EU procurement rules is not optional for anyone working inside an implementing organisation; it is a core competency that needs to be built deliberately.

The political economy shifts. African DFI programmes operate in political economies where the relationship between governments, international financiers, and private sector actors has its own specific dynamics — including sensitivities around sovereignty, post-colonial development narratives, and the credibility of international institutions. EU-funded programmes carry their own political economy: accession politics in the Western Balkans, conditionality dynamics in neighbourhood policy, the institutional culture of EU delegations. The underlying stakeholder alignment skills transfer; the contextual knowledge needs to be built fresh.

Logframe methodology requires formal treatment. Logical framework analysis is widely used in EU programme design and monitoring, and while I have worked with results frameworks throughout my consulting career, the formal EU logframe methodology — with its specific treatment of indicators, sources of verification, and assumptions — requires dedicated attention. Again, this is deliberate curriculum in the current programme.

What this combination actually means in practice

The profile that EU implementing organisations find rare is not someone with EU programme knowledge alone — that is increasingly common as the field grows. It is someone who brings that knowledge together with genuine programme delivery experience: the kind that involves managing real accountability pressure, not just studying it.

Five years securing and governing DFI-funded infrastructure taught me to build governance frameworks that hold under scrutiny, communicate across very different institutional cultures, and maintain delivery discipline when everything is complicated and nothing is simple. That is the foundation. The EU programme knowledge — the funding frameworks, the procurement rules, the logframe methodology — is being built deliberately and systematically on top of it.

The combination is what implementing organisations are actually asking for when they write job descriptions looking for "experience in EU-funded programme management combined with strong PMO skills." They want someone who has actually managed complex programmes, not just someone who has learned the theory of how it should be done.

That is the profile I am building. This is what it looks like from the inside.