The infrastructure of trust

We talk endlessly about the infrastructure of roads, bridges, power stations, data cables, and so on, because they are visible, measurable, and easy to showcase. They create great photo opportunities and generate compelling headlines. Yet, beneath the steel and concrete, beneath the policy frameworks and financing models, there is another form of infrastructure that is harder to see but just as crucial.

Trust

Not as a virtue or a desirable cultural trait, but as a fundamental infrastructure. A load-bearing platform. A system that enables commerce, innovation, and governance. When trust collapses, empires decay, businesses go bankrupt, and communities fracture, even if all the highways and fibre cables remain intact.

The paradox is that we regard trust as “soft,” but history indicates it is the strongest foundation of all.

 

Trust as Infrastructure, Not Intangibility

Consider how we typically define infrastructure: it connects. A road links cities. A port links countries. A data centre links people to the cloud. Trust functions in the same way. It connects individuals and groups who might otherwise have no reason to transact or collaborate.

A road without vehicles is useless. A contract without trust is equally useless if performance is the goal. In fact, even the most advanced transport systems cannot save a society where trust has disintegrated.

One could even argue that trust is the first infrastructure. Long before humans built canals or railways, they relied on trust to hunt in groups, share food, and organise labour. Civilisation itself rests on this invisible architecture. Long before laws were written or currencies minted, trust allowed people to cooperate beyond bloodlines, to plan beyond the day’s survival, and to build systems that outlived individual lives. Without it, no market forms, no institution endures, and no shared future can be imagined. What we call civilisation is, at its core, trust scaled across time and distance.

Trust and Innovation

We also often celebrate innovation as a product of talent, capital, and technology. Those are the visible inputs. The things that show up in pitch decks and policy documents. But underneath all three is trust.

Talent takes risks only when it believes effort will be rewarded rather than exploited. Capital flows only when it trusts that rules will be stable and commitments honoured. Technology is adopted only when people trust that it will not be used against them or fail them when it matters most.

Strip trust away, and innovation becomes timid. People stop experimenting. They stop sharing ideas. They optimise for survival instead of progress. In those conditions, even the most gifted minds and the most sophisticated tools struggle to produce anything meaningful.

A farmer in northern Ghana only experiments with a new seed variety if she trusts that buyers will not undercut her at harvest time. Without that trust, she sows, harvests and sells whatever she has quickly, for whatever price she can get, to avoid being cheated. Her willingness to innovate is held back not by a lack of ability but by a lack of trust in the system.

Silicon Valley, celebrated as the temple of modern innovation, is not fundamentally about technology. It is about risk capital, which is essentially trust capital. Investors pour billions into young founders who may have only a prototype and a compelling story. That is trust made TANGIBLE.

And even adopting technology itself requires trust. Digital wallets. AI-powered platforms. Blockchain tools. These do not scale simply because they are clever or well-engineered. They scale only when people believe the system will work for them, not against them.

When trust is high, adoption accelerates. People are willing to try, to learn, to migrate from familiar habits to new tools. They accept short-term friction because they believe the long-term payoff will be honoured.

But when trust is low, adoption becomes shallow and fragile. People may register for platforms but stop using them. They may experiment once but retreat at the first failure. They keep backups, workarounds, and informal alternatives because they do not fully believe the system will protect them when something goes wrong.

In regions where trust in formal institutions is weak, even sophisticated technology struggles to gain real traction. The issue is rarely access or intelligence. It is fear of exclusion, fear of hidden costs, fear that the rules will change without warning. And once trust erodes, adoption does not merely slow. It reverses. People abandon systems they no longer believe in and return to what feels safer, even if it is less efficient.

So if we ask why certain places leap forward while others stall, the missing variable might not be talent or money, but the invisible infrastructure of trust.

 

Trust and Trade

Trade, at its essence, is an act of faith. I am handing you goods today on the understanding that you will pay tomorrow. I ship cargo across borders with the assumption that your government will not suddenly change tariffs or seize my product.

This fragile faith is what keeps economies running. When it fails, the repercussions are immediate.

The 2008 financial crisis, for example, was not simply about subprime mortgages or toxic assets. At its core, it was a systemic failure of trust.

Banks did not suddenly run out of money. What they ran out of was confidence in one another. Financial institutions operate on the assumption that counterparties are solvent, disclosures are broadly accurate, and risks are reasonably understood. In 2008, that assumption collapsed.

Once banks began to doubt the quality of each other’s balance sheets, interbank lending froze. Institutions chose to hoard cash rather than lend it, not because cash was scarce, but because uncertainty was high. In financial terms, liquidity did not disappear; it became trapped. Money existed, but it stopped circulating.

For non?analysts, the simplest way to understand this is to imagine a marketplace where everyone suddenly suspects that the person on the other side of the transaction might not pay tomorrow. Even with full wallets, trade slows. People wait. They pull back. They protect themselves.

That is exactly what happened at a global scale. Trust broke, and the financial system seized up. Central banks were then forced to step in, not just to inject capital, but to restore confidence. The lesson is clear: modern financial systems are not sustained by cash alone. They are sustained by trust in information, institutions, and counterparties. When that trust erodes, markets stall regardless of how much capital is technically available.

Worlase reminded me this week in a conversation that this principle hits closer to home than I think, and that the trust deficit is visible in everyday urban Ghana.

In Accra, Kumasi, and other growing cities, people transact constantly, yet cautiously. Landlords demand that tenants pay rent upfront that cover longer periods because they do not trust tenants to honour agreements later. Many traders demand cash over transfers because they do not trust reversals or delayed settlements. Businesses insist on deposits before delivery, not out of greed, but out of learned self?protection.

This low?trust equilibrium raises the cost of doing business. Deals require more paperwork, more intermediaries, and more safeguards. Come to think of it, informal personal guarantees have replaced formal contracts in many instances. Time is lost verifying what should be straightforward. Capital moves slower, not because it is scarce, but because confidence is.

Urban economies can appear vibrant on the surface, full of activity and hustle, yet still underperform beneath the noise. When trust is thin, energy is spent on defence rather than growth. People transact, but they rarely scale. And until trust thickens, even the most dynamic cities struggle to convert effort into sustained prosperity.

Trust and Growth

We measure economic success in GDP figures, investment inflows, and export volumes. But these numbers can be deceptive. A country may post impressive growth rates, yet fail to attract long-term investment if its institutions are not trusted.

Investors don’t merely calculate returns; they calculate confidence. In practice, this means stress?testing spreadsheets and systems too. Will laws remain stable across political cycles? Will courts enforce contracts fairly and within reasonable timeframes? Will regulators apply rules consistently, or will discretion, favouritism, and sudden reversals become part of the risk equation?

For institutional investors especially, these questions matter as much as projected margins. A high?return opportunity in a low?trust environment is often discounted heavily or avoided altogether because the assumptions behind it cannot be relied upon.

Trust here is not a moral abstraction; it is a measurable variable. Where trust is high, transactions move faster, contracts are fewer, and compliance costs shrink. Where trust is low, legal fees rise, delays multiply, and capital hesitates.

Businesses know this instinctively. Customer trust translates into repeat sales, referrals, and reputational capital, and I know all these are difficult to measure on a balance sheet. Nonetheless, they are decisive in a company’s survival. In contrast, once trust is lost, no marketing budget is big enough to buy it back.

The Fragility of Trust

Trust is uniquely fragile. It takes years to build, moments to destroy, and often decades to repair.

One corruption scandal can tarnish an entire agency. One default can stain an entire sector. In Ghana, when a cooperative leader mishandles community funds, suspicion seeps into every future collective effort. People pull back, even from unrelated ventures, because the infrastructure of trust has cracked.

This fragility means that trust is not simply an enabler. It is also a systemic risk. The bridge that enables commerce can also collapse under strain, bringing everything it carries down with it.

Measuring the Invisible

Here comes the head-scratcher: if trust is invisible, can we measure it? Economists and social scientists have tried.

Surveys on corruption, fairness, and institutional credibility give us perception data.

Indices like Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index offer comparative benchmarks.

Behavioural proxies, such as savings rates in cooperatives, repayment discipline in microcredit, or the frequency of court disputes, serve as indirect indicators.

Yet none of these quite capture trust in its fullness. They measure perception, behaviour, or outcomes, but not the underlying strength of the system itself.

I think the more revealing metric is resilience. That is, how quickly a society, institution, or market rebounds after a shock. Not whether shocks occur, because they always do, but how people respond when they do.

In high?trust systems, recovery is faster because citizens, businesses, and institutions are willing to hold the line together. People keep their money in banks rather than rushing to withdraw it. Suppliers continue delivering even when payments are delayed, trusting that obligations will be honoured. Workers show up, not because everything is fine, but because they believe collective effort still matters.

In low?trust systems, the opposite happens. Shocks trigger flight. Capital is pulled. Contracts are questioned. Everyone retreats into self?protection at the same time, turning temporary stress into prolonged damage.

Resilience, then, in my opinion, is trust revealed under pressure. It shows us whether a system is held together by shared belief or merely by momentum. When circumstances turn bleak, trust determines whether societies fracture or endure.

Why Trust Is More Valuable than Capital

Hard truth: capital without trust is fleeting. It flees at the first sign of trouble. Trust without capital, however, eventually attracts capital. Investors, partners, and communities will always move towards systems where their stake is respected.

Ports may be built, but if customs officers are distrusted, trade slows. Hospitals may stand tall, but if patients do not trust doctors, they avoid treatment. Banks may boast digital platforms, but if clients doubt their security, money stays under mattresses.

Trust is not an accessory to development. It is the superstructure that makes every other investment viable.

Building Trust as a Public Good

The real paradox: governments and firms invest billions in visible infrastructure, but treat trust as incidental. They assign it to HR workshops, PR campaigns, or occasional corporate social responsibility projects.

But trust is a public good. Everyone benefits from its presence, everyone suffers from its absence, and no single actor can build it alone. It demands systemic effort.

For Africa, this might mean shifting focus from chasing only hard capital to building trust capital.

We need transparent governance that survives electoral cycles.

We need business models that prove communities will not be exploited.

We need financial systems that reward honesty and consistency as much as collateral.

I have seen this dynamic firsthand. A farmer, aggregator, or supplier will deliver consistently, season after season, if he or she trusts that his or her produce will be weighed fairly and that his or her payment will be honoured promptly. The infrastructure of trust often matters more than the warehouse or the truck. I always say, “we didn’t know that being nice was a strategy,” but what we were actually doing was building trust with our suppliers, offtakers, and everyone and everything in between.

To me, it is entirely understandable that I take it personally when my bank contacts my anchor client directly, either in person or in writing, without prior notice, echoing our name and asking questions from a one-sided perspective, whether or not it was done with an excuse. With or without good reason, I see it as an attempt to undermine the infrastructure supporting our entire ecosystem because once the client questions their trust in us, merely because of an unannounced visit from our bank asking about us, regardless of how innocent the questions may seem, a decade of diligent work might not be enough to repair the damage caused by that single move. This could happen even after the bank withdraws from the situation or formally apologises to me for their actions. Trust is indeed delicate like that.

 

The Invisible Foundation

When we cut ribbons for new highways, we are celebrating connectivity. We celebrate what we can see, measure, and inaugurate. But the most vital connections are not made of asphalt, steel, or fibre. They are made of trust.

Innovation, growth, and trade are not merely technical outcomes of capital flows and policy choices. They are downstream consequences of belief, a belief that the person, the firm, or the institution on the other side will keep its word, even when circumstances become inconvenient.

Trust may be invisible, but it is not intangible. It shapes behaviour, allocates risk, and determines whether people lean in or pull back. It is the first infrastructure societies rely on and the last line of defence when everything else is under strain.

Perhaps then the most important development question is not only how much capital we have mobilised or how many projects we have commissioned, but how much trust we have earned, and how carefully we are stewarding it.

Because when trust exists between people, between institutions, and within ourselves, systems hold. Markets function. Innovation breathes. And progress, though rarely linear, becomes possible.

The rest does not happen by accident. It follows trust.

Thank you for reading. I welcome your reflections, questions, and suggestions for future topics. Subscribe to the Entrepreneur In You newsletter here: https://lnkd.in/d-hgCVPy, follow me on all social platforms at @thisisthemax, or get weekly updates via my official WhatsApp channel: www.bit.ly/whatsappthemax.

Wishing you a purposeful and successful week ahead!

The author, Dr. Maxwell Ampong, serves as the CEO of Maxwell Investments Group. He is also an Honorary Curator at the Ghana National Museum and the Official Business Advisor with Ghana’s largest agricultural trade union under Ghana’s Trade Union Congress (TUC). Founder of WellMax Inclusive Insurance and WellMax Micro-Credit Enterprise, Dr. Ampong writes on relevant economic topics and provides general perspective pieces. ‘Entrepreneur In You’ operates under the auspices of the Africa School of Entrepreneurship, an initiative of Maxwell Investments Group.

Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author, Dr. Maxwell Ampong, and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position, or beliefs of Maxwell Investments Group or any of its affiliates. Any references to policy or regulation reflect the author’s interpretation and are not intended to represent the formal stance of Maxwell Investments Group. This content is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or investment advice. Readers should seek independent advice before making any decisions based on this material. Maxwell Investments Group assumes no responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions in the content or for any actions taken based on the information provided.

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