(Bloomberg) -- Benin is moving fast to secure fresh external financing and may launch the first eurobond from Africa in 2025.
The government has appointed Citigroup Inc, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Societe Generale SA to arrange investor meetings beginning on Jan. 8 virtually and in-person in London.
The bond, which would land just shy of a year after Benin’s last dollar bond sale, will be of benchmark size and feature a 16-year maturity and a 15-year weighted average life.
Benin is returning to the eurobond market now “to take advantage of positive market conditions to diversify its funding in a context of solid investor appetite from EM and especially for African issuers,” said Ousseynou Diagne, who’s helping arrange the meetings as head of Africa debt capital markets for Societe Generale.
The west African nation’s sale would add to a record-breaking start of the year for issuance in emerging-market bonds. Developing nation sovereigns sold $26 billion worth in the first seven days of 2025, in part prodded to urgent action by uncertainty surrounding what happens after Donald Trump returns to the White House as US president on Jan. 20.
Benin’s bond could sell around the 8% mark, according to Mark Bohlund, senior analyst at REDD Intelligence. Benin’s 2038 dollar bonds were priced at 8.76% as of 2 p.m. in New York on Wednesday, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
“The government has identified its dependence on external financing as a vulnerability,” Bohlund said. He said other challenges that would prompt an early sale include “political instability in neighboring Niger and domestic tensions around President Patrice Talon’s leadership ahead of the 2026 elections.”
Benin is set to hold presidential elections next year with Talon set to step down after serving two terms. He had initially pledged to serve only one five-year term, but later backtracked and won a second term in 2021 in elections boycotted by the opposition.
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Benin is also grappling with a spillover from an Islamist insurgency in neighboring Niger, marked by an uptick in militant activity. The government has received some military assistance from the US to help fight militants in its north.
In October, S&P upgraded the outlook on Benin’s long-term foreign-currency debt to positive from stable, a day after the country reached a staff-level agreement with the International Monetary Fund to access up to $95 million in financing.
The government has access to “ample pockets” of financing between concessional funds like those from the IMF, and commercial financing, Societe Generale’s Diagne said.
Alongside the eurobond, Benin is offering a €250 million capped tender for its 4.875% euro-denominated bonds due 2032, with financing from a loan provided by a commercial bank.
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(Updates with meetings in second paragraph, comments from third paragraph.)
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