A financing package from development finance institutions IFC and Proparco has been announced for digital infrastructure provider WIOCC Group. WIOCC says the package will fund its expansion strategy in three African countries.
The financing includes loans of US$10million and ZAR200 million (about US$11.1 million) from IFC, a member of the World Bank Group, and US$20 million from Proparco, a development finance institution and subsidiary of the Agence Française de Développement Group.
WIOCC says it expects to sign an additional US$10 million loan for its expansion from another bank in the next few weeks.
With this funding, WIOCC Group says it will expand its core and edge data centres in the DRC, Nigeria, and South Africa to meet growing demand for colocation and other data centre services. It will also grow its fibre networks.
The financing is structured as a sustainability-linked debt, with pricing linked to WIOCC's commitment to improve the energy-efficiency of its data centres and obtain EDGE green building certification for them. EDGE, an IFC innovation, makes it easy to design and certify resource-efficient and zero carbon buildings.
Ariane Ducreux, Head of Energy, Digital and Infrastructure at PROPARCO, points out that truly neutral and open-access data centres are the cornerstone of a diversified digital ecosystem.
He continues: “Local data storage and processing capacity are also vital for the resilience of Africa's digital network, as recent outages have demonstrated. The sustainability-linked structure of this new financing, along with technical assistance support, also aims to incentivise the rollout of energy and water-efficient data centres, while adapting implementations to the specs of each site environment."
