IFC’s new gas projects will destroy Africa

As Africa faces deepening debt, climate shocks and energy poverty, the World Bank’s private-sector arm is quietly approving new fossil gas projects. Two investments backed by its International Finance Corporation (IFC) expose a dangerous contradiction at the heart of global climate finance. Coming at a time when Africa is bearing the brunt of a climate crisis it did not cause, the IFC — the World Bank Group’s private-sector lending arm — is quietly moving to approve two new fossil gas–related projects on the continent.

Framed as pragmatic, transitional and development-friendly, these investments instead reveal a troubling pattern: the continued prioritisation of fossil fuel infrastructure over people, renewables and long-term resilience. One of the projects in question is the Sahara LPG project, a $100 million multi-country investment in new liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) storage terminals across Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and Tanzania, paired with IFC-backed trade finance for fossil fuel distribution. The other project is the Cap des Biches (CdB) gas conversion project in Senegal, which aims to convert a thermal power plant from heavy fuel oil to liquefied natural gas (LNG).

Taken together, these projects raise serious questions not only about climate alignment but also about transparency, consultation, debt and whose interests international finance institutions truly serve in Africa. LPG and LNG are not benign stopgaps: they require long-term infrastructure, lock countries into volatile import markets and divert scarce public and private capital away from renewable energy systems that are cheaper, faster to deploy and better suited to expanding energy access for 600 million people on the continent living in remote rural communities. The Sahara LPG project exemplifies this contradiction.

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The IFC plans to finance four new “greenfield” LPG storage terminals in some of Africa’s most congested and environmentally sensitive port and industrial zones — Tema, Apapa, Mombasa and Dar es Salaam — while simultaneously underwriting trade finance facilities that support the procurement, shipping, storage and distribution of LPG, LNG and other fuels across the continent. This is not a marginal intervention. It is a regional fossil fuel logistics build-out.

The expansion of its infrastructure is still fossil fuel expansion. One of the most alarming aspects of these projects is how little information has been made publicly available and how late.

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