Strategic View:
WIOCC Group has closed a $65 million debt facility with a powerful DFI consortium including IFC, Proparco, and Ninety One. This club deal fuels the expansion of Africa’s digital backbone.
Full Story:
Bridging the digital divide requires patient capital. This week, WIOCC Group, a leading provider of digital infrastructure in Africa, announced a $65 million debt syndication. The facility was arranged as a “Sustainability-Linked Loan,” incentivizing the company to meet specific green and social targets.
The lender club is a “who’s who” of development finance: the International Finance Corporation (IFC), France’s Proparco, the Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund (EAIF), and asset manager Ninety One. This consortium approach is vital in emerging markets where single-bank risk limits often stifle growth. By pooling their balance sheets, these institutions can write a larger check with longer tenor (maturity) than local commercial banks.
The capital will fund the expansion of WIOCC’s terrestrial fiber networks and its Open Access Data Centres (OADC) division. This infrastructure is the physical rail upon which Africa’s fintech and cloud economy runs. The deal structure—linking interest rates to sustainability KPIs—is becoming the gold standard for “Impact Club Deals.”
Why It Matters:
Digital infrastructure in Africa is recession-proof. This deal proves that specialized debt clubs are willing to finance African tech growth even when broader capital markets are risk-averse. It paves the way for future “Fiber-co” financings in Nigeria and South Africa.
Source(s):
The Tech Capital
