The Missing Middle: reading the draft together

The most valuable criticism was that the first draft understated how much preparation work does get funded, just not at the project sizes we care about. The published version is narrower and more precise as a result.

The Missing Middle was published on 22 July 2026 and is available in the white papers library.

Rather than present finished work, we sent the draft of The Missing Middle round in advance and used the session to have it challenged.

The paper argues that most African agricultural projects fail before financing rather than because of it, that the failure is a small and identifiable set of missing documents, and that the question of who funds those documents is the single highest-leverage unsolved problem in African project finance.

We went through the argument section by section and collected objections. The strongest of them made it into the published paper.

• The argument in five minutes
• Section-by-section challenge
• What the paper is not claiming
• What would have to be true for the argument to be wrong
• Open discussion