Lomé secures €50M from France for key waste management and rural road projects

Economic governance

Friday, 13 May 2022 18:56

Lomé secures €50M from France for key waste management and rural road projects

(Togo First) - France will provide Togo a little more than CFA33 billion or €50 million to manage waste in its capital city Lomé, and build rural roads across the territory. The money will be disbursed as concessional loans through the French Development Agency (AFD).

In detail, the AFD will provide Togo with €20 million (around CFA13.2 billion) to partially finance stage four of the Urban Environment Project of Lomé (PEUL IV), and €30 million (around CFA20 billion) to partially finance the Rural Road Support Program (PAPR II). Regarding the latter, it also benefits from the financial support of the German Development Bank, KfW.

Related financing agreements were inked on May 12, 2022, by Togo’s minister of finance and economy Sani Yaya, France’s ambassador to Togo Jocelyne Caballero, and Germany’s ambassador, Mathias Veltin.

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“I would like to stress that this support from AFD consolidates the decentralization process that Togo has initiated some years ago,” Yaya said on the sidelines of the signing. On the same occasion, he praised “the quality of the cooperation between our country, Togo,” and its European partners, knowingly France and Germany in this case.

Launched in 2006, PEUL aims to improve the conditions in which the people of Grand Lomé live. In its first two stages, it restructured waste collection and pre-collection segments in the capital, and led to the construction of a modern landfill at Akepé, among others. The third phase, which is being deployed at the moment, focuses on making sure that the old landfill of Agoè-Nyive is environmentally safe, and on bolstering the financial and administrative capacities of the Grand Lomé municipality.

As for the upcoming fourth phase, it should consolidate previous achievements, according to minister Yaya.

For its part, the second phase of the PAPR aims to build 2,000 km of rural roads and enable households and farmers to better access inputs and markets. It is backed by several partners, including AFD and KfW.

The Togolese government wants to build 4,000 km of rural roads by 2025.

Ayi Renaud Dossavi

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