Pangea-Risk brings new LORE to African project risk assessment

Pangea-Risk, a specialist intelligence advisory, and Johannesburg-headquartered Standard Bank’s Energy and Infrastructure Finance team have released a new jointly developed framework for assessing project risk for resource development in Africa.

The Localised Opportunity and Risk Evaluation (LORE) framework is an analytical complement to sovereign ratings that aims to capture the subnational and sectoral dynamics that determine whether a project could be bankable within its local or global environment.

The partners say LORE is designed for use by export credit agencies, private insurers, and commercial banks operating in high-risk markets, where national averages can mask strong local governance, mature industries, or project “enclaves” with different risk profiles.

“Our collaboration with Standard Bank’s Energy and Infrastructure Finance team began with a simple but powerful question: how can we credibly and commercially assess project-level risk beyond sovereign baselines? That question led to the creation of the LORE framework, a data-driven tool capturing local governance, sector dynamics, and resource-specific resilience,” said Gabrielle Reid, Head of Advisory at Pangea-Risk.

According to Pangea-Risk, LORE combines structured reasoning on local governance, infrastructure, community relations and security with analysis of sector maturity and the resilience of the underlying resource. The intention is to show where sovereign “ceilings” may over- or understate risk, and where targeted mitigants (whether logistical, contractual, or social) can shift a project’s profile.

“We hope this new methodology will help turn risk into opportunity for critical minerals development across emerging and frontier markets, thus unlocking bankable projects that were previously deemed uninvestable,” said Bilal Bassiouni, Head of Risk Forecasting at Pangea-Risk. “What LORE shows us is that risk is rarely uniform across a country. Even within the same national rating, we find provinces and sectors that perform very differently. The framework gives us a clearer, evidence-based way to see those variations, helping institutions identify where opportunity and exposure genuinely diverge.”

Standard Bank’s perspective, as discussed in the webinar, is that a structured, comparable view of local context can reduce evaluation time and help distinguish genuinely bankable projects from those carrying structural risks — particularly in frontier markets — by surfacing the “nuanced story” behind individual assets and locations.

“Getting into the nuance is what is most useful for us and getting a single view of this story, this nuanced risk story, is in many respects so useful for us because, A, it cuts down time for us having to do that digging deeper to get the localized understanding and, B, it adds to whether this is something we should be exploring or not,” said Ralph Gunn, Senior Vice President for Mining, Energy, Infrastructure, and Export Credit Financing at Standard Bank. “Hopefully that’s going to assist us in speeding through our investment decisions quicker.”

While no framework can eliminate uncertainty, LORE could help achieve more transparent and evidence-based risk assessment for African project finance.