France has decided to provide Ivory Coast a financing of €2.125 billion (about FCFA1,394 billion) between this year and 2020. This was revealed by Ivoirian Prime Minister Amadou Gon Coulibaly, at the end of a visit by a French delegation, from July 12 to 13.

According to the PM, the facility will be used to fund projects in “key sectors in line with the 2016-2020 National Development Plan (PND)”. In details, €725 million (FCFA475.5 billion) will be injected into power, road, health, security, education and training projects, while, €1.4 billion (about FCFA918.34 billion) will “complete funding for the first line of Abidjan’s subway”.

With this, works for this line should finally commence after being postponed repeatedly due to issues between the government and firms to which the project was awarded. It should be mentioned however that the 37.9km-long line which was initially expected to cost a little more than a billion Euros (about FCFA665 billion) will now cost nearly €1.4 billion (FCFA918.34 billion). This is a bit expensive when comparing to Dakar’s subway which is 51km long and is to cost about €687 million (FCFA450 billion).

Also, let’s recall that the project to develop the Abidjan subway, which should carry 300,000 passengers each day, will be carried out and operated by Société de Transport Abidjanais sur Rail (STAR), a firm controlled by French Bouygues (33%), Korean Hyundai Rotem (33%), French Keolis, subsidiary of SNCF (25%) and Korean Dongsan Engineering (9%).

B.K