The Africa Finance Corporation will lend Dangote Group $600 million to triple Nigeria’s urea output and build a new fertilizer plant in Ethiopia, part of a $7 billion push.
The Africa Finance Corporation (AFC) announced the facility on Monday. It goes to Greenview Fertilizer Corp, Dangote’s fertilizer holding company, and will raise Nigeria’s urea capacity from three million metric tonnes a year to nine million, while adding a separate plant in Ethiopia with three million tonnes of capacity. The loan forms part of a broader $7 billion fertilizer programme Dangote is rolling out across the continent.
The scale is the point. Africa leans heavily on imported fertilizer, and its farmers use far less than peers elsewhere. Zubairu noted that the continent’s 1.5 billion people consume about six million tonnes of urea a year, against 40 million in India and 50 million in China. Closing that productivity gap, he argued, is essential to Africa’s food security and its ability to feed itself.
The deal also shows how AFC bankrolls such projects. Zubairu, the corporation’s president and chief executive, called it a case of “AFC’s capital recycling model in action,” referring to money repaid from earlier Dangote loans and put back to work. AFC had fully recovered a foundational $300 million loan to Dangote Industries and helped arrange a $3 billion syndicated package for the Dangote refinery, the largest in Africa.
For Dangote, the prize is exports. Group president Aliko Dangote said the expanded operation should earn more than $4 billion a year in urea exports within three years, easing pressure on Nigeria’s foreign exchange. He has set a target of growing the group to $100 billion by 2030.
The expansion centres on the Dangote fertilizer complex at Ibeju Lekki near Lagos, already one of the world’s largest granulated urea sites. If the programme delivers, it would change where African farmers buy a basic input, pushing the continent from importer toward exporter at a time when food costs and supply shocks have unsettled markets.
