WIOCC III

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The WIOCC Holding Company Ltd (“WHCL” or “Company”) is the parent company of West Indian Ocean Cable Company (“WIOCC”) is a wholesale broadband connectivity provider, linking countries along Africa’s coastline and connecting to Europe and the rest of the world. WIOCC owns 28% of the EASSy cable, a 10,000km submarine cable that runs along the east coast of Africa and also buys capacity from other submarine cable assets including EIG and WACS. WHCL is jointly owned by a private equity fund, Africa Capital Alliance, Management and 10 African telecommunication companies, all leading operators in their respective markets. The company is an existing IFC client, with three previous investments having been made - https://disclosures.ifc.org/#/projectDetail/ESRS/25340 in 2007;  https://disclosures.ifc.org/#/projectDetail/SII/38381in 2016 and https://disclosures.ifc.org/project-detail/SII/44202/rse-covid-wiocc in 2020. The Company is now looking to expand into the data centre business which complements its current connectivity business as well as expand its terrestrial and marine footprint to West Africa. To support this planned growth, IFC intends to make an equity investment of up to US$30 million in the company. The IFC investment will be used to partly fund the company’s capital expenditure plan of US$261 million during FY22 to FY24 which mostly includes the development of a pan-African data centre network; and investment in new submarine cable(s) to increase future capacity on both the east and the west coast of Africa (the “Project”). The submarine cable(s) construction in West Africa began in 2020.