Idrissa Nassa's Coris Holding joins a $430 billion banking coalition targeting Africa's $50 billion agricultural trade gap

Africa's agricultural trade financing gap just got the most serious institutional response it has ever received. On the sidelines of the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, French development finance institution Proparco launched the Africa AgriTrade Coalition, a platform bringing together 17 financial institutions with a combined balance sheet of approximately $430 billion to unlock capital for agricultural value chains across the continent.

Idrissa Nassa's Coris Holding is among the African anchor institutions in the coalition. He is joined by James Mwangi's Equity Group Holdings, KCB Bank, CRDB Bank, Ecobank Transnational and Mauritius Commercial Bank, alongside a mix of Arab and European lenders including Qatar National Bank, BPER Banca and the Union de Banques Arabes et Françaises.

The numbers put the ambition in perspective. Africa faces an estimated $50 billion shortfall in agricultural trade financing annually. That gap has kept smallholder farmers locked out of formal supply chains, starved agribusinesses of working capital and suppressed intra-African food trade that the AfCFTA was designed to accelerate. Proparco CEO Françoise Lombard said 500 million euros was committed on the day of the launch alone.

The initiative is explicitly aligned with the African Continental Free Trade Area's goals of deepening regional integration and expanding intra-African agricultural trade. Member institutions will channel financing into agricultural value chains across production, processing, logistics and trade, with the coalition providing a structured framework for deploying capital at scale rather than through fragmented bilateral arrangements.

Ecobank went further at the same summit, announcing a separate $3 billion commitment over three years to support intra-African and international trade financing, part of the Africa-France Impact Coalition backed by Presidents Macron and Ruto. The two announcements together signal that Nairobi produced not just diplomatic language but actual capital commitments, backed by named institutions.

Coris Holding's inclusion is significant beyond its balance sheet. Nassa has spent nearly two decades building the most extensive indigenous banking network in Francophone West Africa, operating across 12 countries with over $9 billion in assets. His understanding of agricultural trade flows in the UEMOA zone and across the Sahel gives the coalition genuine operational credibility in the markets where the financing gap is most acute. The Africa Forward Summit Declaration, adopted May 13, formally committed African and French leaders to strengthening agricultural value chains through agro-processing, cold storage and expanded trade under the AfCFTA. The coalition is the financial architecture behind that declaration.