China’s state-owned Export-Import Bank will lend 500 million US dollar for the the Welkait Sugar Mill Project.

The project, is one of the  the ten sugar factories planned under the 5-years Growth and Transformation Plan(GTP), is located 1,200 km north of the capital, in Tigrai region.

Ethiopian Sugar Corporation awarded part of the project to the Chinese company, China CAMC Engineering Co., Ltd. (CAMCE), last June 2013.

The 647 million USD contract contains construction of a 24,000t/d sugar mill, a 4X30MW bagasse power station and affiliated irrigation equipment with 36 months project life-span.

Three fourth of the cost, about 500 million USD, will be provided by the the Export-Import Bank of China, Ethiopian Finance Minister Sufian Ahmed told Bloomberg’s correspondent last weekend.

The Welkait Sugar project will cover more than 45 thousand hectares of land with sugarcane plantations and will have the capacity to crush 24 thousand tons of cane per day (tcd), when fully completed

The rest of the project works, including the construction of dams, is the responsibility of Ethiopia’s Metals Engineering Corporation (MetEC).

MetEC undertook to build a dam of 3.8 billion cubic meters reservoir capacity on Zarema River.

The Welkait Sugar Factory is designed to 484 thousand tons of sugar per annum when it becomes fully operational.

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