IFC plans $40M bet on Naguib Sawiris’ Nile Sugar project

The International Finance Corporation is weighing a $40 million investment in a sugar beet project backed by one of Egypt’s most prominent business dynasties, as the country tries to chip away at a stubborn reliance on imported sugar.

Documents reviewed by Ecofin Agency show the IFC, the private-sector lending arm of the World Bank, is considering a senior loan to Nile Sugar Company, a privately held sugar beet producer with roots going back to 2006 and currently under the umbrella of Naguib Sawiris’ Orascom Investment Holding. The proposal has been circulating internally for several months and is awaiting final approval.

The financing would be structured as two equal tranches of $20 million each. The IFC would provide one tranche directly, while the other would be mobilised from third-party investors. The loan carries a seven-year maturity, with a three-year grace period built in.

Orascom picked up Nile Sugar in 2019 in a deal worth 3.7 billion Egyptian pounds, equivalent to roughly $71.8 million at the time, deepening the conglomerate’s footprint in Egypt’s agribusiness sector. The acquisition gave Sawiris a stake in a strategic industry that Cairo has been trying to develop from the ground up, literally.

The IFC money is earmarked to develop 13,711 feddans, about 5,760 hectares, of farmland in Minya, in Upper Egypt, dedicated to sugar beet cultivation. The investment package also covers infrastructure, equipment and working capital, including financing for seeds and agricultural inputs distributed to the company’s network of smallholder farmers who supply the operation.

Nile Sugar runs a refinery in Nubariyah along the Alexandria-Cairo desert road, capable of processing up to 11,000 tons of sugar beet per day and turning out around 232,000 tons of white sugar per season. The facility sits roughly 350 kilometres from the new farming areas in Minya, but the IFC has drawn a direct line between the two, noting the refinery depends almost entirely on supply from the farms being developed.

The project ties into a much larger ambition. Egypt’s Countryside Development Company, a joint structure linking the ministries of Finance, Agriculture and Housing, is overseeing a national program to bring four million feddans of desert land into productive use by 2030. The goal is to expand agricultural output, pull in domestic and foreign capital and put sustainable development language into something tangible.

Egypt’s sugar production hit 2.8 million tons in 2025, with authorities eyeing 2.9 million tons the following year, which would translate to a self-sufficiency rate of about 81%. That is a modest climb from 75.8% in 2024, but the math still leaves a gap. The country consumes around 3.2 million tons of sugar annually, meaning imports remain unavoidable for now.

Those imports are shrinking, though. Sugar import volumes are expected to drop to 1.5 million tons in the 2024-2025 season, down from 1.8 million tons the campaign before. Cairo sees projects like the Nile Sugar expansion as part of the longer push to close that gap and reduce the foreign currency drain that comes with buying sugar on world markets.