Public-Private Partnerships

Mongolia was seeking to use public-private partnerships (PPPs) to accelerate infrastructure development and attract private investment into sectors ranging from energy to municipal services. However, the country’s PPP framework was still in its early stages: a new PPP unit had been established, but the legal, institutional, regulatory, and technical systems needed to support successful PPP transactions were not yet fully developed. The Government and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) engaged DHInfrastructure to help build the policies, institutions, regulatory frameworks, and transaction capacity required to operationalize Mongolia’s PPP program.

We began by supporting the development of Mongolia's PPP enabling environment. Working with the Government's Parliamentary Subcommittee, we provided input into the drafting of the Concessions Law that would govern PPP transactions. We helped the PPP unit develop a business plan, core policies and procedures, and an institutional development and capacity building plan—giving the unit the operational framework it needed to identify, prepare, and oversee PPP transactions. We conducted extensive training sessions on PPP transaction preparation and tender processes and advised on procedures and regulations for approving PPP projects. To consolidate this guidance into a lasting reference, we drafted a PPP Handbook for the unit — a practical tool that codified international best practice in a form tailored to Mongolia's legal and institutional context. We also developed a capacity development plan for environmental and social safeguard compliance, ensuring that Mongolia's PPP framework incorporated the standards expected by international development finance institutions.

With the institutional foundations in place, DHInfrastructure supported Mongolia in taking its first major PPP transactions forward. For the proposed 450-megawatt combined heat and power plant number 5 (CHP5) in Ulaanbaatar—one of Mongolia's most potentially consequential infrastructure investments—we assessed the Government's institutional capacity for structuring the transaction, evaluated progress on ADB technical assistance, and advised on the design of a follow-on program to take the transaction through to procurement. In the South Gobi region, where the Government wanted to attract private operators to provide water, sanitation, and solid waste services in two rapidly growing mining communities, DHInfrastructure led the transaction advisory team in structuring the public-private partnership arrangement, preparing tender documents, and advising on the legal and regulatory reforms needed to support it. We drafted tariff policy, service quality guidelines, and licensing regulations for the new services, and provided extensive training to the newly established Water Services Regulatory Commission on tariff-setting methodologies, service quality monitoring, and licensing—ensuring that the regulatory capacity needed to oversee the transactions was being built alongside the transactions themselves.

Nigeria’s National Integrated Power Project (NIPP) was a major initiative to expand the country’s generation capacity through a portfolio of thermal power plants developed by the Niger Delta Power Holding Company. As private investors evaluated opportunities to participate in the sector through competitive acquisition processes, one investor engaged DHInfrastructure to provide commercial, financial, and regulatory advisory support related to selected NIPP generation assets.

DHInfrastructure conducted commercial and regulatory due diligence on the relevant assets, including analysis of the Nigerian electricity and gas markets, review of the contractual framework governing power sales and fuel supply arrangements, and assessment of key operational and market risks affecting long-term project viability. We also evaluated alternative fuel supply considerations where relevant and provided the client with an integrated assessment of the opportunities and risks associated with the potential acquisition targets.

The Public-Private Infrastructure Advisory Facility (PPIAF) has funded technical assistance to support private sector participation in infrastructure across the developing world for more than two decades. To understand what works—and what doesn't—across that portfolio, PPIAF commissioned DHInfrastructure on three separate occasions to conduct systematic evaluations of its projects and, in two cases, deeper assessments of its engagement in specific countries.

Under three separate engagements with PPIAF, DHInfrastructure conducted a mixed-methods analysis of 198 projects alongside an additional 190 previously evaluated by PPIAF, identifying patterns of success and failure across the portfolio and developing case studies to illustrate both. All three evaluation rounds assessed evidence of outcome realizations for an array of regional and country-specific projects across PPIAF's main infrastructure sectors—energy, digital technology, transport, telecommunications, and water and sanitation—as well as projects that developed global knowledge products. DHInfrastructure also conducted country assessments of PPIAF's projects in Peru from 2000 to 2022 and South Africa from 2000 to 2024. Each project was assessed against the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC) criteria of criteria of relevance, coherence, effectiveness, impact, and sustainability. Both country assessments involved reviewing project documents, interviewing task teams and in-country stakeholders, and providing recommendations on how PPIAF should shape its future work in each country.

The International Finance Corporation (IFC) managed two donor-funded programs supporting public-private partnerships in its Europe and Central Asia region: the Southeast Europe Infrastructure Advisory (SEIA) and the ECA Infrastructure Advisory (ECA IA). With both programs approaching their end dates, IFC needed an independent evaluation to determine whether donor funding should be renewed.

DHInfrastructure conducted an external assessment of both programs across their full life cycles, examining their operations, organizational structures, project work, and business development efforts. The evaluation applied the OECD Development Assistance Committee criteria of relevance, efficiency, effectiveness, impact, and sustainability, supplemented by IFC's own criterion of additionality—a standard that asks whether the program achieved outcomes that would not have occurred without IFC's involvement. Drawing on that analysis, DHInfrastructure identified lessons learned from both programs and provided actionable recommendations for IFC and its donor partners on how to structure any continuation of funding.