IN SHORT: A coalition of multilateral development banks has committed $900 million to Nigeria’s Project BRIDGE, a plan to expand the country’s national fibre backbone from 30,000 kilometres to 120,000 kilometres by end-2027 and connect all 774 local government areas. The AfDB approved $200 million on April 13, joining $500 million from the World Bank and $100 million from the EBRD. Total financing is $2 billion, with the remainder sourced from private sector partners.
Nigeria has assembled a $2 billion multilateral financing coalition behind Project BRIDGE, its most ambitious digital infrastructure programme ever, with the African Development Bank’s $200 million approval on April 13 completing the international development bank stack alongside the World Bank and EBRD and bringing the country within reach of tripling its national fibre backbone in under two years.
Project BRIDGE, also referred to as the Digital and Viable Infrastructure for Broadband Expansion programme, is structured as a public-private partnership through a Special Purpose Vehicle and overseen by the Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy under Minister Bosun Tijani.
- The four-times expansion of Nigeria’s fibre network from 30,000 to 120,000 kilometres targets universal LGA connectivity across all 774 local government areas, cross-border fibre links to Benin, Cameroon, Niger and Chad, and broadband penetration growth from the current 45% to 70% by 2030.
- The AfDB board approved its $200 million loan on April 13 in Abidjan. The bank described the project as addressing Nigeria’s structural infrastructure deficit in digital connectivity, which it assessed as a binding constraint on economic competitiveness, job creation and financial inclusion.
- The World Bank’s $500 million commitment, confirmed earlier in 2026, represents one of the bank’s largest single digital infrastructure loans to a sub-Saharan African country. The EBRD’s $100 million participation extends an institution more commonly associated with Eastern Europe and Central Asia into West Africa, signalling the bank’s expanding mandate in frontier markets.
- The programme is projected to generate 2.8 million jobs during construction and operation, and to contribute materially to GDP through expanded e-commerce, digital financial services, remote work, and government service delivery. An independent economic assessment commissioned by the Ministry cited a multiplier effect of approximately $4.50 in economic activity per dollar of fibre infrastructure investment in the Nigerian context.
- Nigeria’s internet infrastructure has long been identified as a bottleneck to its digital economy ambitions. Despite having Africa’s largest population and one of its most active tech ecosystems, the country ranks poorly on connectivity cost and reliability metrics, and large parts of the North and rural Southeast remain effectively offline for commercial broadband purposes.
- The SPV structure is designed to attract private co-investment from telecoms operators, who will purchase access to the expanded fibre backbone rather than build parallel infrastructure independently. MTN Nigeria, Airtel Africa and IHS Towers are all expected to participate as anchor tenants.
Minister Tijani described the programme as building Nigeria’s digital infrastructure backbone and called the multilateral coalition a vote of confidence in the country’s economic reform trajectory under President Bola Tinubu.
The Bigger Picture: Nigeria has 220 million people and 45% broadband penetration. The arithmetic is stark: 120 million Nigerians are not meaningfully connected to the internet economy. Project BRIDGE is an attempt to fix that at infrastructure scale, with MDB money de-risking the private capital that follows. The execution risk is real: Nigeria has a history of ambitious infrastructure programmes that stall at implementation. But the structure here is different from past failures — the SPV model, the MDB oversight conditions, and the private sector anchor tenancy arrangements create accountability mechanisms that direct government procurement never did. If it delivers, the economic payoff is enormous. If it doesn’t, the $2 billion will have funded very expensive fibre that nobody connects to.
