When asked about the value of this fund that serves as a guarantee for investors, the Angolan Planning Minister said that the fund will be endowed with 120 million dollars, but stressed that "with financial engineering" the value of these guarantees, which can also be loans for investments, could increase.
The Lobito corridor will connect the port of Lobito, in Angola, and Zambia, passing through the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRCongo) to the north, on a railway that will be widened and, in the part already built, improved.
The corridor, said the minister, is seen differently depending on whether it is the international community or the Angolans themselves: "For the international community, the corridor is nothing more than taking strategic minerals from Zambia and the DRCongo, and using the Benguela railway to transport them to the West and to America, but we see the corridor in a different dynamic", he said.
For the government, the Lobito Corridor "is a more integrated and structured project that will be used for specific benefits for Angola", which include using the route to transport national production and creating economic hubs along the line that crosses the country lengthwise.
The aim is to "attract investors to invest along this line, develop the mining processing industry and create technical and technological schools to support what is along the corridor", said Victor Hugo Guilherme.
The project, which has attracted considerable interest from international investors, particularly from the United States of America and the European Union, should, according to the government official, later be replicated further south in Angola, taking advantage of the knowledge accumulated with the development of the initiative in the centre of the country.
"The Lobito corridor cuts the country in two, but as part of the rail transport development plan, we want to launch the Namibe corridor, which runs from the port of Moçâmedes to the province of Cuando Cubango; we will launch the project as if it were a copy of the Lobito corridor. We will soon put this corridor out to tender to balance what we are doing in the centre with what we are going to do in the south", concluded the minister.
The Lobito Corridor is the first strategic economic corridor launched under the auspices of the G7 Partnership for Infrastructure and Global Investment (GPI), in May 2023, followed by the signing of a joint declaration between the European Union (EU) and the United States of America (USA), on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in September 2023 in New Delhi, supporting the development of the Corridor.
In October last year, during the Global Gateway Forum, the EU and the US signed – together with Angola, the DRC, Zambia, the African Development Bank (AfDB) and the African Finance Corporation (AFC) – a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to define the roles and objectives for the expansion of the Corridor.
AFC is the lead promoter of the project that will connect the three African countries, and the railway is expected to generate economic benefits of approximately US$3 billion for the countries, reduce air emissions by around 300,000 tonnes per year, and create more than 1,250 jobs during its construction and operations.
