Madar (Niamey) - Niger's Prime Minister Ali Mahaman Lamine Zeine on the afternoon of Thursday, 12 November 2026, chaired a meeting between the government and a World Bank delegation led by its Vice President for Western and Central Africa, Ousmane Diagana, the official Niger Press Agency (ANP) reported.
According to the agency, the World Bank has prepared about $760 million in additional funding as part of the launch of a new partnership framework with Niger drawn up under the government's leadership, on top of more than $4 billion the institution has in the country.
The aim is "over the next five years, to prepare new, larger and more structuring operations", building on the results of previous operations and learning from them "to move faster and more efficiently", Diagana said after the meeting.
The meeting, attended by the economy and finance minister and sector ministers, focused on three major initiatives. The first is energy, which the two sides want to make "accessible to all Nigeriens and affordable, with a quality" that allows the economy and the population to carry out their activities, the World Bank official said.
On agriculture, he said the talks looked at ways to go further towards "the definitive resolution of food insecurity problems", creating jobs through farming and helping farmers set up small and medium-sized businesses.
On water, he said Niger had prepared with the Bank "a sort of compact" setting out urgent reforms, public investments and the frameworks needed to bring in the private sector, so that water is not "a luxury". He said these initiatives "reinforce each other" and that results were already visible in the energy sector, where implementation of the compact has begun.
Diagana, who was ending a mission to Niger, said the two sides also reviewed progress in the partnership, including the round table the government held with the technical and financial partners of the Kandadji dam programme to relaunch it, speed up its implementation and mobilise its funding, ANP said.
