The biggest headline from November’s FOCAC meeting was China’s pivot away from infrastructure funding. But like many FOCAC headlines, it needs several asterisks. In the first place, the pivot might actually be away from a particular infrastructure model (massive projects funded with large bilateral Chinese policy bank loans and built by Chinese state-owned enterprises) rather than from infrastructure-building itself.

The larger question is what China is pivoting to. Instead of infrastructure disappearing from the Africa-China menu, we may be entering a new phase of road-testing, with more Chinese financiers, more intricately mixed financing models and a broader range of companies testing the waters.