The Lobito Atlantic Railway consortium has secured US$753 million in loans to speed up work on the Angolan portion of the Lobito Corridor, reports Reuters.
Under the agreement signed in Washington on Wednesday, the Lobito Atlantic Railway (LAR) consortium secured a US$553 million loan from the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and a US$200 million loan from the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA). Initially disclosed last year, the deal has only now been finalised.
The funding will go toward upgrading the roughly 1,300 kilometres of railway linking the Port of Lobito to Luau, on the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), enabling track upgrades, workshops, signalling systems and rolling stock.
According to a statement from the DFC, the funds will also support the rehabilitation and operation of the existing minerals port in Lobito, boosting transportation capacity 10-fold to 4.6 million metric tons and cutting the cost of transporting critical minerals by as much as 30 percent.
[See more: President João Lourenço of Angola makes the case for US investment in Africa]
LAR – comprising Portugal’s Mota-Engil, Singapore-based commodities trading firm Trafigura and Belgian rail firm Vecturis – won a 30-year contract to run the Benguela line in 2022. It forms the backbone of the Lobito Corridor, a US-led project aimed at connecting critical mineral mines in landlocked DRC and Zambia to the Atlantic coast.
The corridor project involves constructing 515 kilometres of rail lines in Zambia and 315 kilometres in the DRC that will connect to the Benguela line, creating a direct line from Zambian copper fields and cobalt mines in the DRC to the Port of Lobito.
Lead developer on the project, Lagos-based Africa Finance Corporation (AFC), is seeking proposals from contractors for construction of the Zambia portion now that a feasibility study has been completed. More financing deals are expected to be finalised in 2026, a senior AFC official told Reuters in September.
The critical minerals transport corridor comes as China seeks to revive the Tanzania-Zambia railway corridor. Earlier this year, China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) said it would invest US$1.4 billion in the project, which relies on Tanzanian ports.
