How financing rules shape infrastructure transparency rankings

The story, plainly

Two Ugandan expressways, both contracted by the Uganda National Roads Authority, financed in two different shapes.

Road one is the Kampala-Entebbe Expressway, 51 kilometres of four-lane toll road. The Export-Import Bank of China lent the Government of Uganda USD 350 million at 2 percent fixed, over a 20-year maturity with a 7-year grace period. Uganda contributed USD 126 million, for a total of about USD 476 million. China Communications Construction Company built it, and it opened in June 2018. The money passed through the treasury and left a paper trail: loan agreement, debt record, budget lines, audits. Monitoring definitions keyed to sovereign loans count it, because the definitions were written for exactly this shape: follow the loan, find the project.

Road two is the Kampala-Jinja Expressway, a 95-kilometre limited-access expressway including the Kampala Southern Bypass, with an indicative cost of about USD 1.5 billion. It is being delivered as a 30-year availability-payment concession: a private concessionaire designs, builds, finances, operates and maintains the road, and the state pays for availability rather than toll revenue, so the government retains the traffic risk. The contracting authority is the Uganda National Roads Authority, and the African Development Bank approved a USD 229.5 million sovereign loan toward phase one, alongside co-financing from Agence Francaise de Developpement and the European Union. It was still in procurement when the disclosure portal entry was captured.

So road two is not purely private money, and it is not a classic toll build-operate-transfer. It is a hybrid: a long private concession with public co-financing. It also does not share a financier country with road one. That is the point. The two roads differ in the shape of the money far more than in the flag behind it.

Two distortions follow.

First, scoring that credits any published information, whoever published it, flatters projects whose financiers have strong publishing cultures. A funder's rich project page can earn a government a "transparent" score while that government publishes nothing. You graded the bank's website.

Second, scoring that demands records a structure never generated condemns the newer shapes. A concession negotiated with the company that finances and builds it may never hold a competitive tender. Writing a zero for the missing tender record measures the deal's structure and calls it secrecy. A zero can mean three things: the record was hidden (the only real failure), the record never existed, or the record does not exist yet. Where a structure skips the tender, the public's questions do not vanish; the disclosure expectation shifts to the concession award and its terms.

The three boundary rules (a proposal)

1. Define eligibility by purpose, material stake, and control, not instrument. Public asset or public service under government-granted concession? A material project interest (financing, ownership, revenue, guarantee, concession) held by a foreign-controlled party? Yes to both: it counts.
2. Ask why a record is missing before scoring it. Hidden scores zero. Never-existed is excluded, with the expectation shifted to the records that do exist. Not-yet-due waits. The denominator adjusts so honest reporting never looks worse than silence.
3. Credit the publisher, and give every figure a passport. Classify information by who controls its publication. A funder's page proves existence; only government publication is government disclosure. Every figure carries source, retrieval date, currency, and exchange rate with its date.

These rules are a proposal for how a comparison should be built. No published methodology has adopted them.

Key figures

Provenance and limits

Both roads are public record, both in Uganda, and both contracted by the Uganda National Roads Authority. One arrived as a sovereign buyer's credit and one as a long availability-payment concession, and that contrast is what the argument uses.

• AidData, China Eximbank provides $350 million preferential buyer's credit for Entebbe-Kampala Toll Road Construction Project, project 14235: https://china.aiddata.org/projects/14235/
• African Development Bank, Kampala-Jinja Expressway Project (Sovereign Operation, Phase 1), project appraisal report, October 2018: https://www.afdb.org/sites/default/files/documents/projects-and-operations/uganda_-kampala-_jinja_expressway_project_sovereign_operation_-_phase_1.pdf
• African Development Bank, Uganda's Kampala-Jinja Expressway project approved by African Development Bank, 5 November 2018: https://www.afdb.org/en/news-and-events/ugandas-kampala-jinja-expressway-project-approved-by-african-development-bank-18638
• Uganda PPP disclosure portal, Kampala-Jinja Expressway (KJE) PPP entry. The portal is offline as of September 2026, so the record used is the Internet Archive capture of 12 August 2022: http://web.archive.org/web/20220812111959/http://disclosure.pppunit.go.ug/project/11/kampala-jinja-expressway-kje-ppp

Three honest qualifications. The Kampala-Jinja entry was captured while the project was still in procurement, so some of its thinness is stage-appropriate rather than a disclosure failure. The concession is a hybrid, not purely private, because the African Development Bank co-finances phase one; that cuts the same way as the argument, since much of the disclosure that does exist comes from the financiers rather than as routine government publication. And a check of the Uganda PPP disclosure portal's archived project set found no Kampala-Entebbe Expressway entry: the loan-financed road does not appear in the PPP register, and the Kampala-Jinja project does not appear in AidData's China-financing dataset. Both absences were checked, not assumed.

Two things this essay does not do. It does not compare document counts between the two roads: an earlier draft set a World Bank road-maintenance project's filing trail against a single PPP portal entry, which is not a like-for-like comparison and mixed a third, unrelated project into the case. It also does not claim that both roads share a financier country; they do not.

Figures are as reported by these sources. Nothing here scores, ranks, or characterises any country.

The closing line: Before you compare governments, make sure you are not comparing their bankers.