A visual essay on measurement
Uganda built two expressways. Transparency scoring only sees one of them.
Both were contracted by the same roads authority. Entebbe-Kampala came as a sovereign loan, so it sits in the public record with its interest rate and its grace period. Kampala-Jinja came as a toll concession, so it does not appear in that record at all. The instrument decides who looks transparent, before anyone scores a thing.
Road one · Uganda · public record
Follow the loan, find the project
The Entebbe-Kampala Expressway. For decades, this is what foreign-funded infrastructure looked like, and every definition still knows how to see it.
USD 350 million lent by the Export-Import Bank of China to the Government of Uganda, at 2 percent fixed, over a 20-year maturity with a 7-year grace period. Uganda added USD 126 million of its own. Total: about USD 476 million, built by a Chinese state contractor, opened in 2018. sources
The money enters the treasury, joins the budget, and leaves a paper trail the whole way: a signed loan, a public debt record, budget lines, audit reports. Follow the loan and you find the project.
Ask any monitoring framework whether this is foreign-funded infrastructure and the answer is instant.
counts · foreign-fundedRoad two · unnamed, deliberately
The money that never touches the treasury
Now a second expressway, financed from the same country. Roughly two billion dollars. It is a real case that I will not name, used here as an archetype, because it stands for a pattern, not a scandal.
A foreign company finances the road, builds it, and will operate it for decades, earning its money back from tolls before handing it over. The state granted the land, approved the route, and gave the concession.
No loan to government. No entry in the public debt book. No budget line. The money reaches the same kind of public asset, directly.
Concessions, equity stakes, joint ventures, supplier's credit, guarantees: a growing share of foreign infrastructure finance now arrives this way. Uganda shows both shapes at once. The Entebbe-Kampala Expressway came as a sovereign loan and sits in the aid-flow record with its interest rate, its grace period and its collateral. The Kampala-Jinja Expressway came as a thirty-year build-operate-transfer concession and sits in a national PPP register that is currently offline.
Your call
Would your methodology count road two as foreign-funded?
Public asset. Foreign finance. No sovereign loan. Not what you feel is right, what your current rules would actually score.
Choose an answer, or keep scrolling, to see how common definitions treat it.
Definitions that key on sovereign loans and aid flows say no.
They look for a loan to a government, or aid administered through a budget. This project has neither. So a roughly two billion dollar piece of public infrastructure, financed entirely from abroad, quietly drops out of the study before scoring begins.
Counted as foreign-funded: 1 of 2. Same financier country. Same public purpose. Different shape.
Boundary one · what enters the study
Definitions written for instruments go blind by design
An instrument-keyed definition does not fail randomly. It keeps seeing the finance that still flows the old way, and it cannot see the finance that moved.
The definition sees
Invisible to it
Both of our roads can come from the same country's finance. One counts, one vanishes. The problem is the shape of the money, not the flag on it. And a study that only sees one shape is not comparing countries. It is comparing instruments.
A fair comparison has to settle three boundaries, in order: what enters the study, what records should exist, and who gets credit for publishing them.
Boundary two · what records should exist
The same zero tells three different stories
Road two's concession was negotiated directly with the company that financed and built it, so no tender was ever held. A scoresheet that expects a tender record writes a zero. But what does that zero mean?
The record exists, or should exist, and was not published. A signed contract on no portal. This is the thing transparency work is meant to catch.
No tender was ever held, so there is no tender record for anyone to publish. Scoring this zero as concealment measures the deal's structure and calls it secrecy.
A completion report for a project that finishes in three years. Nobody on earth has it. A fair method waits; an unfair one calls it opacity today.
One caution cuts the other way: a structure that skips the tender does not erase the public's questions. The expectation shifts to the concession award, the direct-award justification, the negotiated terms. The expected record moves. It does not vanish.
Boundary three · who gets the credit
Grading the bank's website
Multilateral and bilateral lenders publish rich project pages: appraisals, costs, procurement notices, completion reports. Useful documents. But watch what happens when a scoring exercise credits them as government transparency. Two Ugandan road projects, both contracted by the same agency, the Uganda National Roads Authority.
Funder page · World Bank NERAMP (P125590)
Government page · Kampala-Jinja Expressway PPP
Left: World Bank Uganda North-Eastern Road Corridor Asset Management Project, IDA 243.8m dollars, closed; document list from the World Bank's own document API, projects.worldbank.org P125590. Right: Uganda PPP disclosure portal entry for the Kampala-Jinja Expressway, indicative value about 1.5bn dollars, last updated 25 October 2021, captured while the project was still in procurement. The portal itself is now offline, so the record is the Internet Archive capture of 12 August 2022. Both retrieved 25 July 2026. Two honest qualifications: a project still in procurement is expected to have published less than one that has closed, and the Kampala-Jinja concession is a hybrid, not purely private, since the African Development Bank approved 229.5m dollars for its first phase. That second fact cuts the same way as the argument: the disclosure that does exist for the PPP road comes from a funder, not from the government.
If any published information earns the credit, regardless of who published it, then the score measures the funder's publishing culture and calls it government openness. The government's own silence disappears inside its banker's diligence.
The repair
Three boundary rules fix the comparison
None of them changes a scoring scale. They change what enters it, what a missing record means, and who gets credit. Settle them before anyone scores, because they decide more than the scale ever will.
Define by purpose, stake, and control
Is it a public asset, or a public service under a government-granted concession? Does a foreign-controlled party hold a material interest in the project: financing, ownership, revenue rights, a guarantee, a concession? Follow the ownership chain past the local company to decide control. Yes to both: it counts, whatever the instrument is called.
Ask why a record is missing before scoring it
Hidden scores zero. Never-existed is excluded, with the expectation shifted to the records the structure did generate. Not-yet-due waits. The denominator adjusts, so honest reporting stops looking worse than silence.
Credit the publisher, and give figures a passport
Classify information by who controls its publication, not where you found it. A funder's page proves the information exists; government disclosure means publication through a government-controlled channel, which need not be the project owner's own website but is never the funder's. And every figure travels with its source, date, currency, and exchange rate, or it is not evidence.
The same two roads, fairly
Both roads in. Both asked the same questions.
Counts, as it always did
Now scored on what the government itself published: the loan, the budget lines, the audits. The funder's documents stay as evidence, not as a substitute.
in scopeCounts, at last
Public asset, material foreign stake, foreign control: in. Scored on the records its structure actually generates: the concession award, the terms, the tolls, the handover.
in scopeDrivers pay tolls on both roads. On road one, the tolls help service a forty-year public loan. On road two, they repay a private financier directly. Different paper, same public. The questions a citizen is entitled to ask do not change with the financing structure. The definitions just have to catch up.
The point
Transparency rankings often measure the shape of the money and the publishing culture of financiers. Before you compare governments, make sure you are not comparing their bankers.
Provenance and sources
This essay draws general lessons from recent cross-regional work mapping how foreign-funded infrastructure is defined and measured. That work is not mine to publish, so no programmes, partners, or study countries are named here, and road two is an unnamed archetype of a build-operate-transfer concession. Road one is a matter of public record:
- Entebbe-Kampala Expressway financing: USD 350 million preferential buyer's credit from the Export-Import Bank of China, signed 18 May 2011, at 2 percent fixed, 20-year maturity with a 7-year grace period, with USD 126 million from the Government of Uganda against a total project cost of USD 476 million; contractor China Communications Construction Company; commissioned June 2018. Sources: AidData project 14235 (retrieved 25 July 2026), Uganda Ministry of Works.
- The disclosure comparison: World Bank NERAMP, Uganda, P125590 lists 50 documents (types taken from the World Bank's own document API); the Uganda PPP disclosure portal entry for the Kampala-Jinja Expressway lists 3. Both projects were contracted by the Uganda National Roads Authority. The PPP portal is offline as of 25 July 2026, so the entry is cited from the Internet Archive capture of 12 August 2022, when the project was in procurement. The Kampala-Jinja concession is part-funded by the African Development Bank (USD 229.5 million approved for phase one), so it is a hybrid rather than a purely private concession.
- A Wayback index check of the PPP disclosure portal found seven archived project pages, and the Entebbe-Kampala Expressway is not among them: a loan-financed road does not appear in the PPP register, and a PPP road does not appear in the aid-flow datasets. That absence is the mechanism this essay describes, verified rather than asserted.
Figures are as reported by the sources above. Nothing in this essay scores, ranks, or characterises any country.