Kenyan President William Ruto told the 25th COMESA economic community heads-of-state summit in Harare on Oct. 22 that the $16 billion Dangote refinery at Lamu, for which he and Nigerian industrialist Aliko Dangote broke ground Sept. 30, “will be almost wholly funded by African financial institutions,” Capital FM reported. Ruto, who handed the COMESA chairmanship to Zimbabwe’s Emmerson Mnangagwa, used the refinery as his case for African states placing their reserves with their own institutions, using them to finance development, and backing their bonds. “Africa holds more than $4 trillion in domestic financial assets,” he said, much of it sitting in foreign accounts earning little. The institutions he named were the Afreximbank, the Africa Finance Corporation, and the African Trade and Investment Development Insurance agency, in which Kenya has increased its shareholding. He pointed to the Alliance of African Multilateral Financial Institutions as a vehicle for lending across the continent.

Afreximbank President George Elombi said the refinery project in Lamu “demonstrates Africa’s capacity to conceive, finance and build major industrial assets… Africa has the capital, the enterprises and the markets to reduce that exposure.” The bank has an established record with Dangote: it underwrote $2.5 billion of a $4 billion loan for the Dangote refinery in Nigeria this year, the largest share in the syndicate, after $1.35 billion in 2025 and a $1 billion working-capital line once refining began, and it says it has invested roughly $15 billion into the Dangote Group since 2015.

The 700,000-barrel-a-day complex, which would be East Africa’s largest, is designed to replace the Sh530 billion Kenya spent importing petroleum products last year.