Gulf capital is now a top-five financier of African infrastructure. No database tracks it.

The transparency infrastructure around Chinese development finance in Africa is, by now, genuinely good. The Boston University Global Development Policy Center publishes loan-level data from 2000 onwards. AidData's Global Chinese Development Finance Dataset captures off-balance-sheet lending the BU set misses. The two disagree, and the disagreement is informative.

Nothing equivalent exists for the Gulf. Tracking Emirati, Saudi and Qatari infrastructure capital in Africa currently requires assembling DP World and AD Ports announcements, ACWA Power project filings, sovereign wealth fund annual reports, Global SWF's transaction database and bilateral summit communiqués — and then accepting that the resulting series has unknown coverage.

Our indicative aggregation puts Gulf commitments to African infrastructure above $11bn in the latest year, which would place the bloc ahead of all OECD bilateral donors combined. We publish that number with an explicit health warning: it is assembled from announcements, and announcements systematically overstate. The honest position is that nobody knows, and that the not-knowing is a policy problem, because concessionality, tenor and collateralisation terms are invisible.

This is the clearest open gap in the entire African infrastructure data landscape, and it is fillable. A Gulf equivalent of the BU database would take a small team two years.