By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 20
Every megaproject has a public face and a quieter figure who decides whether it is real. At DBSA, that work runs through her division.
Every megaproject has a public face and a quieter set of people who decide whether it is real. At the Development Bank of Southern Africa, the person whose function stands behind the Hyphen commitment is Catherine Koffman, the bank’s Group Executive for Project Preparation, whose desk exists to turn ambitious schemes into bankable ones.
Her role is easy to overlook and hard to overstate. Preparation is where a project is judged financeable or not, and Koffman leads the function that makes that judgement across South Africa and the wider sub-continent. When DBSA agreed to fund Hyphen’s early studies, it was her part of the bank that the decision ran through.
The desk where bankability is decided
Koffman was appointed Group Executive for Project Preparation at DBSA with effect from February 2021, charged with building a pipeline of infrastructure projects credible enough to attract finance. It is a role defined by the unglamorous middle of a deal: not the announcement and not the ribbon, but the studies, structuring and diligence that decide whether either ever happens.
That places her function at the centre of the Hyphen story. A green hydrogen project cannot reach a final investment decision without the preparation work her team funds and oversees, which makes the preparation desk, not the launch stage, the point where a scheme lives or dies.
Preparation is where a project earns the right to be financed, and that is her brief.
A career built in project finance
Koffman is a qualified, admitted attorney with more than two decades in legal, commercial and financial services, and a record in infrastructure project finance across several landmark transactions. She has pointed to being the first woman to head infrastructure project finance in a South African commercial bank, a marker of how thin the field has been for women at that level.
That background matters for the work. Project preparation is a legal and financial discipline as much as a technical one, and a career spent structuring complex transactions is precisely the training a bankable-pipeline mandate demands. The expertise, not the profile, is why the role fits her.
The skill that prepares a project is financial and legal craft, learned deal by deal.
Women in the rooms where capital is committed
Koffman has spoken publicly on the place of women in infrastructure development, a sector where decision-making has long sat with men. Her position is notable precisely because project preparation is where large capital is shaped, and a woman leading that function at a regional development bank is a visible change in who holds that authority.
Representation at this level carries practical weight. The people who prepare projects decide which risks are studied, which communities are consulted and which benefits are counted, so who sits at the preparation desk shapes what a project is asked to prove before it is built.
Who prepares a project helps decide what that project is made to answer for.
The principal behind the commitment
It would be wrong to reduce a bank’s decision to one person, and Koffman leads a function rather than acting alone. But profiles of infrastructure too often name only chief executives and ministers, when the durable work is done by the executives who prepare the deals. In the Hyphen commitment, that work sits with her division.
The measure of the role is continuity. A launch is a single day; preparation runs for years, through studies, revisions and the slow assembly of a financeable case. The people who sustain that effort, Koffman among them, are the ones a project ultimately depends on.
Ministers announce projects; the preparation executives are who carry them to a decision.
For anyone tracking who actually moves African infrastructure, Catherine Koffman is the kind of principal the headlines miss: not the promoter of the Hyphen project, but the development-bank executive whose function decides whether it becomes bankable at all. The question her role poses to any backer is whether to court the public faces of a megaproject, or the preparation desks where its fate is quietly settled.
Sources: Hyphen Hydrogen Energy; Catherine Koffman on women in infrastructure development (CNBC Africa); DBSA Group Executive Project Preparation appointment (BusinessLIVE)
