Genesis Capital has pulled off a first for West African capital markets, advising on a CFAF 42.65 billion ($76.5 million) green bond for Ivory Coast solar developer Poro Power 1 S.A. -- the first project finance green bond ever issued by a private energy company in the WAMU region.
The Abidjan-based investment bank structured the bond as a 15-year instrument carrying an 8.75% fixed coupon, rated A- by Bloomfield Investment Corporation. Africa Finance Corporation wrote a $50 million anchor cheque, enough to pull in local institutional investors who would not have touched an untested structure otherwise. The deal closed fully subscribed.
The money goes toward a 66-megawatt solar plant in Korhogo, northern Côte d'Ivoire -- the country's largest privately-owned solar facility on completion, expected in 2027. The plant sits on a 25-year take-or-pay power purchase agreement with the Ivorian government, the kind of contract structure that makes long-tenor bond investors comfortable. Annual output is projected at 130 GWh, enough to supply 400,000 households and cut 70,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year.
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For Genesis Capital, the deal is a calling card. The firm, led by managing partner Charles Kié, built a structure that had never been used in the WAMU energy market and got it across the line with international-standard documentation, a Morningstar Sustainalytics green opinion, and AFC as co-arranger. That combination gave regional investors something they rarely see: a long-dated, rated, green-labelled private infrastructure bond with hard contractual protections.
The total financing package combines €30 million ($33.4 million) in equity with the €65 million ($72.3 million) bond, with MAC African SGI serving as market arranger. The project is led by Ivorian entrepreneurs Jean Marc Aïé Yapi and Livane Bouedy, backed by shareholder Côte d'Ivoire Solar I GmbH.
The deal is the first infrastructure project financing raised through public capital markets in the WAMU, and the first direct AFC investment on the regional bond market.
1 USD =0.85 EUR as of the time of publishing
Key Takeaways
Genesis Capital's execution matters beyond this single deal because the WAMU bond market has a structural problem it has not solved: governments borrowed a record 11.9 trillion CFA francs ($21.3 billion) through the market in 2025 and plan to raise 12.7 trillion ($22.8 billion) in 2026, yet private infrastructure issuance has barely registered. The regional regulator CREPMF published a green bond framework in 2020 and the BRVM launched a bond accelerator program with GGGI to push more private issuances, but uptake was near zero until this transaction. What Genesis Capital demonstrated is that the architecture exists -- a rated, covenanted, green-labelled project bond can be sold to domestic institutions at scale -- but it requires an advisor willing to build the structure from scratch and a multilateral like AFC to anchor it and signal credit comfort to the market. That template, now proven, is replicable across the region's pipeline of renewable energy projects at a time when external funding for African infrastructure is becoming harder to access and costlier to deploy.
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