High voltage transmission line (backbone)

The Global Gateway listing describes a 541 km, 400kV high-voltage transmission line connecting Greater Abidjan with substations in the east and north of Côte d'Ivoire, and onward to regional interconnectors serving Burkina Faso and Mali. The project is formally classified as Phase 1 of 5, with an announced EU investment figure of €72 million. Both the multi-phase framing and the investment quantum should be treated as aspirational at this stage: the project carries an "Announced" status, and no independent source has confirmed financial close, contractor appointment, or groundbreaking. The IATI financial records do not provide a clean match for this specific transmission line. The closest candidate in the EU Commission's development finance data is the ENERGOS 2 programme (IATI ID: XI-IATI-EC_INTPA-2016-ACT-D-39393-00), which carries a committed figure of exactly €72 million and runs until December 2036. However, ENERGOS 2 is described as supporting rural electrification access, renewable energy development, and energy efficiency in Côte d'Ivoire — not high-voltage backbone transmission. The match confidence is flagged as medium, and the programme's objectives do not correspond well to a 400kV trunk line. No disbursement figure is recorded against it, which limits any inference about implementation progress. The EIB project database returns no matches. Taken together, the financial data trail does not confirm that the €72 million announced under Global Gateway is new or additional funding, nor that it is yet committed to the specific infrastructure described. Independent news coverage retrieved for this report contains nothing that directly references this transmission corridor. The most relevant contextual item is a June 2026 report that the African Development Bank approved approximately €103 million in financing to expand electricity access across Côte d'Ivoire. That AfDB approval, if confirmed by the bank's own project documentation, would represent a distinct and parallel financing stream. It does not validate the EU transmission line project, but it does indicate that multilateral appetite for Ivorian energy infrastructure remains active.