Nigeria Wealth Fund To Boost Solar, Health Infra With $1 Billion Spend

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(Bloomberg) -- Nigeria's Sovereign Investment Authority is investing up to $1 billion over the next three years, focusing on building solar and healthcare infrastructure to boost growth in Africa's most populous nation.

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NSIA, which is reviewing its investment strategy this year to protect its $2.2 billion in assets from financial market volatility, is exploring areas where it can have a bigger impact while avoiding losses in increasingly global markets. unstable.

The Abuja fund is "in the process" of raising funds internally and from partners to implement projects, chief executive Aminu Umar-Sadiq said in an interview. "Maybe a third will go to us, and the rest to the partners," he said, without naming creditors, citing confidentiality.

The World Bank estimates that Africa's biggest oil producer needs to spend at least $100 billion a year to plug gaps in its infrastructure. Nearly half of the more than 200 million people do not have access to the electricity grid, and more than $400 billion will be needed to build infrastructure, mainly for electricity generation, transmission and distribution, to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. Net zero targets by 2060.

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According to Omar-Sadiq, the NSIA plans to accelerate the West African country's economic and energy diversification by 2026 through investments in sectors such as healthcare, gas industrialization, technology, energy and agriculture.

The fund, one of the largest in Africa, plans to redirect assets to where they are most needed, such as infrastructure, and buy inflation-linked bonds in the US and Europe to ensure stable returns. Profits will decline by 33% in 2022 due to rising interest rates, rising food prices and market volatility.

Some of its recent projects include a $1.4 billion ammonia plant co-development with OCP SA in Morocco and a $22 million global health cancer center partnership with BIO Ventures in Nigeria. This year he also signed an agreement with Vital Group to support the country's energy transition plan.

The company will "expand" renewable energy across the country after building the first 10 megawatt solar plant in the northern state of Kano in 2022, the CEO said, adding that chronic disease infrastructure will also be a priority.

"The impact of NSIA over the last 10 years has been huge and we are well on our way to doing more in infrastructure," he said.

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