How PIDG helped Nigerian companies raise $247 million locally

Nigerian companies looking to finance large projects have either had to raise capital abroad and absorb foreign exchange risk in a currency that moves against them or raise at home in a domestic capital market with traditionally little appetite for infrastructure.

The Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG) has spent two decades trying to widen that choice. A blended-finance institution funded by six governments alongside the International Finance Corporation (IFC), PIDG was established in 2002 to mobilise private capital into infrastructure across low-income and fragile markets. PIDG has been investing in Nigeria since 2004, operating through distinct divisions spanning project development, debt, and guarantees. 

Across its lifetime, PIDG has helped bring close to 300 projects to financial close, mobilising nearly $32 billion of private sector investment into projects collectively worth more than $50 billion. In 2025 alone, it committed $1 billion of its own capital into 33 projects worth $4.1 billion, with almost $3 billion of that coming from private investors.

In Nigeria, its most consequential intervention has been InfraCredit, the domestic credit enhancement institution PIDG helped create in partnership with the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority. 

An independent study by Steward Redqueen, a consultancy firm, published in August, found that 24 Nigerian companies have used InfraCredit guarantees to raise more than ₦327 billion from local capital markets, across sectors like transport, energy, manufacturing, and the Lekki Port and Lagos Free Zone. Pension funds, which were largely absent from Nigerian infrastructure financing before InfraCredit existed, now account for 56% of the value of those issuances.

In this conversation, Saeed Ibrahim, the director of sustainable impact, at PIDG explains why the organisation focuses on building financing markets rather than doing deals one at a time, what it takes to move a Nigerian company from raw commodity exports to processed goods, and why he believes the country’s $3 trillion infrastructure gap is now a question of scale rather than a question of whether the model works.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The report argues that for Nigeria to grow, it needs to build capacity to turn raw materials into higher-value products domestically. What does that mean for you?

Let me answer in two parts. The report was commissioned but written independently by independent evaluators. One of the things we wanted to check is what has proved successful across the period since 2004, when we became active in Nigeria, and where we have seen the biggest impact, examined in a robust and rigorous manner.

What they broadly found is that we have had the biggest impact in two types of markets in Nigeria. One is the manufacturing and value capture side, as you said. But the bigger impact they found in the first instance was on Nigeria’s financing markets, and particularly its infrastructure financing markets.

I would start there because of where you are coming from in terms of venture capital and other types of capital looking to invest. Our approach as an investor is not to take a transaction-by-transaction approach but to think about how we help the existing financial markets in the countries we operate in work better.

What does that mean in practice? If you are a Nigerian company seeking investment for a project, one of your options is to attract foreign capital. That is attractive, and you can potentially raise much larger amounts by going abroad. But there are also huge amounts of capital within the Nigerian ecosystem—in pension funds, institutional investors, insurance companies, and more. Attracting investment from those sources has clear benefits. Foreign exchange and local currency risk is one of the things most top of mind when foreign investors come in, and that is mitigated to a significant extent when you attract domestic financiers.

We think about building those markets so that companies today and in future have a much better chance of attracting capital, particularly from domestic sources where there is already so much capital in the ecosystem. How do we unlock that? By combining the instruments we have—guarantees, long-term patient capital, equity and debt—with technical assistance.

We have done a lot of work with InfraCredit Nigeria, which you may be familiar with. We originally partnered with the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority to create InfraCredit as a domestically based financial institution with the express purpose of supporting domestic companies to prepare their projects, issue debt, and attract capital from domestic investors. The results speak for themselves. The report found that together we have supported 24 companies to attract capital from the Nigerian capital markets, and over ₦300 billion ($227 million) has been raised.

On the second part of your question, about value creation—the report also found a huge amount of benefit there. We worked with Indorama, which produces fertiliser, and over a series of transactions across several years, we provided capital to that company, with the focus on helping Nigeria capture much more value in what it exports to the world.

Last year we also closed a transaction with Robust International. The idea was to build a processing and manufacturing facility in Nigeria so that, rather than exporting raw seed, we add value through processing and manufacturing, and the product that eventually gets exported is of much higher value, with more of that value captured in the Nigerian economy.

There is a macroeconomic claim in the report that credit enhancement helps move capital toward productive use. At what scale do these credit facilities actually move money, and what impact have you seen in terms of creating companies in Nigeria?

Over the years, we have been working in Nigeria; we have helped 24 companies attract capital from the market and close those funding rounds. That was all domestic institutional capital, and it comes to ₦327 billion ($247 million). That is a substantial amount of financing for these companies to have attracted in the period we have been operating.

It gives us a good foundation to understand that there is a huge opportunity here. These are impressive results, and given the needs and how the ecosystem is developing, there is potential to increase that considerably going forward, having built a successful model over the last few years.

But it is not only about numbers. It is also about quality. Before InfraCredit Nigeria was created, we had not really seen Nigerian pension funds active in infrastructure finance or in financing domestic infrastructure companies. Now, pension funds account for 56% of the value of InfraCredit-backed issuances. Of the 24 issuances supported, 56% of all the money raised has come from pension funds. That shows it is not only a matter of scale but also of quality. We are achieving the kinds of changes we wanted to see.

There is a sentiment that, having seen the model work and having felt the demonstration effect in the market, there is now much more opportunity for those funds to flow more quickly and at greater scale.

Of the 24 issuers in the report, only two came back to market without a guarantee. What level of confidence does the average investor here have, and how do we build it?

It is multiple things, and this is one of the key lessons from our work, which the report also emphasises. First of all, you need the right instruments. If you look at what PIDG and InfraCredit Nigeria are doing together, we are not simply providing capital directly to one company. That would be helpful and beneficial, but you have to think about the objectives you are trying to fulfil and the instruments that help achieve them.

Credit enhancement in particular is a good way to build confidence, because what you are saying is that we have confidence in this company. We believe the financing needs they have, and the projects they are going to deliver, are good projects with good impact. We are confident in their ability to repay investors, and the credit enhancement or guarantee only takes effect if that company is unable to do so. It provides a backstop, and it is a signal of confidence from us and from InfraCredit in that company, which allows them to raise financing from the capital markets in a stronger position.

Secondly—and the report really bears this out—the capital and the credit enhancement need to be accompanied by technical expertise and market-building support. In our experience, guarantees alone were not enough. Technical assistance, issuer advisory, investor capacity building, and engagement with the regulatory authorities were all critical to achieving the results we have discussed.

One figure from the report: InfraCredit’s advisory work helped reduce the average time to financial close from more than 200 days to under 30 days. Those are two proven ways to build confidence in Nigerian companies.

The examples in the report span InfraCredit, Indorama Eleme Petrochemicals, and others. They operate in very different verticals. What is the common thread that produced these successes?

To be fair, they are slightly different markets. One is about manufacturing and exporting, and the other is about how financial flows and infrastructure finance work in Nigeria. But at a high level, it speaks to what our mandate is and to what Nigeria’s economic development needs are.

There is a huge amount of infrastructure that needs to be built—globally, on the continent, and specifically in Nigeria. The public purse is not enough. There is not enough money on the fiscal side to build that infrastructure alone. There are many companies in the private sector able to do so, but they need to attract private capital in order to build the infrastructure we need today and going forward.

Infrastructure is broad, and you can attack it from many angles. You can support certain sectors within infrastructure like energy and manufacturing, or you can work on the financial side to unlock more capital directly. That is what links these two spheres of work, though they are quite distinct.

With Indorama, it has been much more focused on allowing a domestic producer to increase its manufacturing capacity successfully and progressively over many years, to the stage where it is now exporting substantial volumes and generating significant foreign exchange and other benefits for the country. With InfraCredit Nigeria, it is about building and improving how infrastructure financing markets in Nigeria work more broadly.

If you look at the 24 transactions InfraCredit has supported, they span the full spectrum of infrastructure. There are companies in transportation, energy projects, and manufacturing projects. Lekki Port is on there. Lagos Free Zone is on there. What weaves it all together is that it is about mobilising investment and getting infrastructure financed, constructed, and producing productively.

Lagos Free Zone is one of the flagship cases in the report. Do you think about a free zone as a company or as a market?

Our work runs predominantly through InfraCredit Nigeria as a domestic institution making its own financial decisions and reviewing projects, so I would not want to go too far into detail on one particular transaction. But broadly, we have supported free zones, and they are an important piece of infrastructure.

The fundamental idea behind free zones is that you have an area with a lot of different infrastructure being provided, offering services to companies in Nigeria that are outward-facing and able to export much more.

The free zone had been expanding and had significant ambitions around increasing Nigeria’s export capacity, and it needed help financing those expansion plans. The company wanted to tap the local capital markets to do so. But going back to what we discussed earlier, the domestic capital markets had largely been unwilling to support infrastructure projects like this on their own.

Through the support InfraCredit Nigeria gave to Lagos Free Zone, we ended up with the longest-tenor bond a domestic Nigerian company had attracted from the capital markets. With that credit enhancement, that support, and that technical assistance, it is a good example of a Nigerian company that wanted to expand, wanted to attract domestic capital, and got support from a locally based organisation working with PIDG to give it the additional confidence to go to market—and achieved a fantastic result.

What’s next in store for PIDG?

Two quick things, both about our next steps in Nigeria.

First, we are proud of what the report shows in terms of our impact, but we are by no means resting on our laurels. The opportunity now is for us and others to take these successful models and scale them significantly. Nigeria still faces an estimated $3 trillion infrastructure financing gap over the next 30 years, and that will require many actors to get involved.

There is often a risk in doing something that has not been done before. What this report shows is that PIDG has demonstrated examples that are proven to work. You no longer need to worry about whether this is a proven model. It is a proven model. The question now is how we scale it up to help Nigerian companies access the financing they need and help Nigeria achieve its economic development goals. The next step is to replicate and scale these approaches to mobilise significantly more capital into Nigerian infrastructure.

Second, agro-processing is an increasing focus for PIDG in Nigeria and across the region. Last year we provided a guarantee of almost ₦30 billion to Robust International to support the development of a processing facility, helping shift production from the export of raw seeds to higher-value processed products. That is one of the most important ways we can help capture more value in places like Nigeria. We have built on that model in West Africa this year, doing something similar with Robust in Côte d’Ivoire.

These investments reflect a broader PIDG priority: using infrastructure finance to help African economies move beyond exporting raw commodities towards local processing, local manufacturing, and ultimately higher-value exports.

Some of these companies have been at this for nearly two decades and are still not operating at a globally competitive scale. How long will it realistically take Nigerian companies to compete globally?

Part of my answer is what I was saying a moment ago. We have successful models, but we need to scale them up. The needs are huge, and we really need to accelerate, and no single actor can do all of this on their own. We call on other investors and partners to work with us to increase the scale of financing.

Secondly, we are quite bullish on Nigeria, and a lot of the international markets are as well. Recent reforms are beginning to deliver greater macroeconomic stability, despite the challenges of the last few years. There is a period of stability we are currently seeing. The economy grew at a faster pace in 2025 and is projected to do so again in 2026. Inflation has fallen, and there are other indicators pointing in the right direction.

That does not mean challenges do not remain — around power, energy, connectivity, inflation, and poverty. But within those challenges, huge opportunities remain. With the period of stability we are experiencing and hopefully will continue to see in the near future, there are significant opportunities for Nigerian companies and infrastructure companies to grow, attract capital, and achieve their expansion plans, supported by partners such as us.

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