In this paper, we describe the objectives, roadmap and recent progress of academic research with respect to benchmarking the financial performance of privately-held infrastructure debt or equity investment, with a focus on the recent development of a new framework to collect data and evaluate such assets.
 
To determine a way forward, we take the following approach: we start from the reasons why infrastructure investment benchmarks are in demand and list the key questions that such benchmarks should be expected to answer. Unfortunately, they remain very difficult to answer today, for lack of the relevant information.
 
Hence, we propose a roadmap to develop a definition, valuation, data collection and portfolio construction framework of privately-held infrastructure debt and equity cash flows designed to answer these important questions.