Sara Benchina
Founder and Principal
Trained as an engineer at l’École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers, Sara Benchina began her career at Keller Group plc, a global geotechnical contractor, where she held roles across site engineering, project management and business development on major Moroccan infrastructure projects. Her experience covered marine construction, ground improvement, retaining walls and foundations, including the TGV maintenance centre, Safi Port, Tangier Med platform packages and port-deepening scopes.
She later moved to the client side at PFO Africa, where she joined major projects at an early stage of formation. Her remit began with foundations and early technical packages, then expanded from technical delivery into the governance centre of a €1B+ EPC-F portfolio that included F Tower, the Abidjan Exposition Centre and Café Cacao Tower, alongside other large-scale capital programmes in West Africa.
Sara built the financing evidence required for banking due diligence. She owned the ESG, contract management, insurance and reporting streams, designing the contractual and reporting controls needed to reduce project risk while carrying requirements from initiation through to completion.
After more than a decade on major projects across Africa, Sara expanded her practice beyond delivery to deepen the strategic, financial and technological foundations behind it. She is completing an MBA at Warwick and has pursued executive study in applied AI at MIT, AI ethics and regulation at Oxford Saïd, and AI for business at Wharton.
Sylvaia is built on this end-to-end knowledge of major projects, from foundations and site delivery to financing evidence, contractual control and executive governance. Its purpose is to bring that experience into a technology-enabled advisory practice, using applied AI to strengthen evidence, reporting, risk control and decision-making across infrastructure capital programmes.
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