Lights beamed down the hall, changing colors every few minutes and glittering against the stage where several business people sat on a panel to fire up a dimly lit crowd. Emmanuel Birba was one of these panelists gathered at the closing of the second edition of a forum organised to mobilise resources to fill Africa's enormous gap in infrastructure financing.

A native of the Caribbean, the tall and young Birba told his audience, dealing with Africa should not be seen as “a one-night stand.” The crowd murmured, some with hysterical laughter. From a panelist who sat next to him: “You can't dream big and invest small in Africa.” Another won applause from the gathering when declaring, “If you aren't in Africa, you aren't in business.”

The message appeared to have hit home, judging by the over 2,200 people from over 25 countries assembled inside the Sandton Convention Centre of Johannesburg, South Africa, for the Africa Investment Forum, who appeared to have taken this statement literally. Two weeks ago, they were there shopping for viable projects in Africa, whether in energy, infrastructure, transport or logistics. Equally, there were as many representing African countries but determined to pitch their respective projects, chasing capital moving around the world.

The absence of Ethiopians was glaring though.

Not one individual from either the public or private sector was in attendance - spare a diplomat from Ethiopia's embassy in Pretoria - missing out on the 52 transactions made in 72 hours that were estimated to value 40.1 billion dollars. A project to build a 2.6-billion-dollar sky train in Ghana's capital of Accra raised 600 million dollars in equity; the largest was a liquid natural gas pipeline from Mozambique to Japan projected to cost 25 billion dollars.

Mozambique's Prime Minister signed a deal during the Forum for one billion dollars in financing with its creditors. When completed, the project will position this impoverished southern African country to claim four percent of the global market share for LNG exports.

Ethiopia would have remained obscure at the sole market for capital on the continent if it was not for a lone project pitched by Birba, a chief financial officer for Tulu Moye Geothermal Operations Plc. A subsidiary company of the French Meridiam Infrastructure Africa Fund, managed by Thierry Deau, the company raised the initial investment of 58 million dollars, alongside Reykjavik Geothermal, an Icelandic company that owns 49pc of Tulu Moye.

The project, initiated almost three years ago, aspires to generate 520MW of electric power from a geothermal source when the four phases are completed at a location bearing the company's name, 100Km southeast of Addis Abeba in Oromia Regional State. The company hired a Kenyan company last month to begin drilling for the construction of the plant, whose first phase is hoped to generate 50MW of power to be sold to Ethiopian Electric Power through a power purchase agreement signed in 2017.

This first phase alone will cost the company 250 million dollars, two-thirds of which its managers hope will come from debt and equity. Birba was busy in Johannesburg two weeks ago, meeting potential investors in one of the six boardrooms where deals were actively pursued. He met no less than six prospective investors, including those from the European Investment Bank and the African Development Bank (AfDB), the latter the organizer of the Forum.

“Africa is bankable,” declared Akinwumi Adesina, president of the AfDB. “It's impatient for development. It's like a bride.”

Finding a groom for this bride is found to be tasking; and bridging the financing gap to pay for mega projects in Africa, such as Tulu Moye, no less daunting. It is estimated to reach as high as 130 billion dollars, although few experts put this number much further than 40 billion dollars. Yet a staggering 1.8 trillion dollars held by global institutional investors searches for bankable projects across the world.

Africa, with over half a billion young people, is perceived as a high-risk destination for investment and viewed as a continent in perpetual need of development aid. Changing this narrative remains the Achilles' heel of those who have taken the burden of promoting Africa as the “new and confident continent” ascribed by Adesina.

Africa should not be a place for “a billion dollars in development assistance” but a market for “trillions of dollars in investment,” according to Neven Mimica, the outgoing EU Commissioner for International Cooperation & Development.

“It's an exciting time for Africa,” said Mimica, whose institution has allocated 60 billion dollars in funding to provide loan guarantees for businesses in the continent hoping to create more than 10 million jobs in five years. “We have to do more and faster.”