Ghana brings back tolls — and the State keeps 70%.
Ghana is reintroducing road and bridge tolls through a 20-year PPP with electronic, free-flow collection — after suspending manual tolling in 2021 because it “deprived the road sector of vital maintenance funds.” 38 upgraded and 28 new toll points.
The design question isn’t the technology — it’s what the State’s 70% cut is: a return on a public asset, a ring-fenced maintenance fund, or a general levy on drivers? Each is recognised differently on the books.
India revives BOT by taking demand risk back.
India’s Ministry of Road Transport revised its Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) highway model in May 2026, adding traffic-risk sharing, revenue support and buyback to make road PPPs bankable again — after BOT collapsed to under 5% of awards.
Traffic-risk sharing works — it revives private appetite. But every point of demand risk the State takes back is a contingent liability: a top-up it may owe if traffic disappoints. Bankability bought with an unpriced guarantee is a cost deferred, not avoided.
A long pipeline — but few deals close.
Nigeria’s infrastructure deficit is put at about $2.3 trillion. Its regulator (ICRC) has a growing PPP pipeline — but the measure that matters isn’t how many projects enter it, it’s how many reach financial close. Most don’t.
The projects that stall aren’t badly designed; they’re not bankable. Between a good idea and a signed deal sits a viability gap — the shortfall between what users can pay and what the asset costs — that no length of pipeline fixes.
One in three PPPs gets renegotiated.
Across the world, roughly a third of PPP contracts are renegotiated after signing — and it’s worst where the money is: 58% in Latin America, 42% in transport. The usual trigger is a cost or traffic surprise; the usual outcome is a higher tariff or a government payment.
Renegotiation isn’t failure — it’s the system working around risk it mispriced up front. But it quietly moves cost onto users and the budget, once the bidders have left the room.
Who keeps the toll. Who carries the risk. Who counts it.
A revenue share, a demand guarantee, a viability gap, a renegotiation — four faces of one gap: frameworks that decide who keeps the toll and who carries the risk, but count neither until it fires. The tools to see it exist: