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Ethiopia Sells Bonds to Finance Africa’s Biggest Power Plant
By William Davison
Sept. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Ethiopia plans to offer more bonds to finance Africa’s biggest power plant after selling 7 billion birr ($408 million) of debt domestically over the past six months, Communications Minister Bereket Simon said.
The sale will contribute to the 80 billion birr needed to finish the 5,250-megawatt Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile River, Bereket said in an interview on Sept. 27. The country isn’t raising funds from foreigners in a bid to demonstrate its economic resurgence, he said.
Ethiopia, source of the main tributary of the Nile River, started building the hydropower plant in April as it seeks to become a regional electricity exporter amid shortages in countries including Kenya, Sudan and Uganda. The Horn of Africa nation, which relies on commodities such as coffee for most of its foreign currency, is also diversifying an economy that the African Development Bank says may double in size by 2020.
“Building a dam on the Nile has been the dream of every Ethiopian,” said Bereket, who heads a so-called public mobilization council to raise funds for the project. “For millennia, we have been looking at the Nile as if it has been a curse that took our fertile soil and benefited others while Ethiopia was impoverished.”
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