The World Bank has approved over N13.21 trillion ($8billion) as loans for different developmental projects for President Bola Ahmed Tinubu-led federal government in the last 20 months.
Analyses of the various loans indicated that they were targeted at several interventions in various sectors of the economy with three fresh loans amounting to $1.1 billion approved between Friday and yesterday.
It was gathered that the country’s debt profile has hit N142 trillion, according to data published by the Debt Management Office (DMO).
The 2025 budget of N54.99tn has a debt service component of N14.32tn and N13.64tn for recurrent expenditure.
This development comes as the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) on Tuesday reported the highest Net Foreign Exchange Reserve position as of the end of 2024.
According to the CBN data released on Tuesday, NFER stood at $23.11 billion, the highest level in over three years.
The development marked an increase from $3.99 billion at year-end 2023, $8.19 billion in 2022, and $14.59 billion in 2021.
the federal government is expected to receive fresh loans from the World Bank, totalling $2.2 billion in 2025.
Just last Friday, the bank approved a $500 million loan to support the country’s Community Action for Resilience and Economic Stimulus Programme.
The loan was granted on March 28, 2025, under the project titled, “Community Action (for) Resilience and Economic Stimulus Program,” which aims to provide essential support to households affected by economic downturns and to bolster community resilience.
Just yesterday, the bank approved two other loans including $80m for the Accelerating Nutrition Results in Nigeria 2.0 project and $552m for the HOPE for Quality Basic Education for All programme.
Minus the $800 million support of July 2023, the federal government has in the last 20 months secured a total of $8.6 billion from the World Bank. This translates to N13.2 trillion at the current exchange rate.
On June 9, 2023, the World Bank approved a loan of $750 million to boost Nigeria’s power sector.
The loan with project ID: P174622 was tagged as additional financing for the Power Sector Recovery Performance-Based Operation, which was first approved on June 23, 2020.
In the same month, specifically on June 23, the World Bank approved $500 million for the Nigeria for Women Program Scale Up (NFWP-SU).
The scale-up financing was to further support the government of Nigeria to invest in improving the livelihoods of women in Nigeria.
In July 2023, Nigeria secured $800 million from the World Bank to cushion the impact of high fuel prices after the removal of fuel subsidy. The government later clarified that the $800 million was not a loan but a support from the World Bank.
In September 2023, the World Bank approved an additional $700 million for the Adolescent Girls Initiative for Learning and Empowerment (AGILE) project to improve learning outcomes of the girl–child.
The approval on-boarded 11 additional financing states which, joined the initial seven pilot states.
The states are: Adamawa, Bauchi, Gombe, Jigawa, Kogi, Kwara, Nasarawa, Niger, Sokoto, Yobe, Zamfara.
And in December 2023, the World Bank approved the Nigeria Distributed Access through Renewable Energy Scale-up (DARES) project, being financed by $750 million International Development Association (IDA) credit.
It was expected to leverage over $1 billion of private capital and significant parallel financing from development partners, Daily Trust gathered.
The financing from development partners include $100 million from the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet and $200 million from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).
In June 2024, the World Bank released a $1.5 billion loan to Nigeria to support Nigeria’s Reforms for Economic Stabilisation to Enable Transformation (RESET) Development Policy Financing Program (DPF).
Then, another $750 million was approved for the Nigeria Accelerating Resource Mobilization Reforms (ARMOR) Program-for-Results (PforR).
The combined $2.25 billion package, according to the World Bank “provides immediate financial and technical support to Nigeria’s urgent efforts to stabilise the economy and scale up support to the poor and most economically at risk.”
On September 26, 2024, the multilateral organisation also approved three operations for a total of $1.57 billion to support the Government of Nigeria in strengthening human capital through better health for women, children and adolescents and building resilience to the effects of climate change such as floods and droughts through improving dam safety and irrigation.
Furthermore, in October, the World Bank approved a $500 million loan to support the Sustainable Power and Irrigation for Nigeria (SPIN) project aimed at reducing climate-induced challenges.
The year ended with another approval of $500 million in concessional financing for the Rural Access Agricultural Marketing Project- Scale Up (RAAMP-SU) in Nigeria, according to the Washington DC-based institution.
