The EIB Borrows Money Cheaply So It Can "Lend" It to Africa. Taxpayers Overjoyed.

The European Investment Bank does not take deposits like a normal bank.

It borrows on capital markets at very low rates because the EU Member States stand behind it.

Then it lends the money out.

The official description is “win-win partnerships aligned with national priorities.”

Fact is that European taxpayers provide the guarantee that allows the EIB to borrow cheaply, after which the money is deployed in places where full commercial repayment is, at best, an optimistic assumption.

The EIB does not lose sleep over this. It is not a commercial bank - a policy instrument with a banking licence.

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In 2025 the EIB Group signed roughly €100 billion in new financing.

About 90 percent of it stayed inside the European Union.

The remaining 10 percent, roughly €9 billion, went through EIB Global to the rest of the world.

Of that €9 billion, €3.1 billion went to Africa.

There are solar and wind transmission lines in Tunisia, renewable mini-grids for rural Madagascar, digital connectivity programmes, research networks, space partnerships, desalination plants, waste management systems, vocational training and sanitation projects.

Roughly half of EIB Global’s activity outside the EU is now concentrated on the African continent.

Forty-six percent of it carries a climate label.

Ukraine received a record €1.5 billion

from the same pot in 2025, bringing the total since the full-scale invasion above €4 billion.

The money goes to energy, infrastructure and "small businesses".

It is presented as reconstruction and EU integration support.

Europeans will never see any of it again either.

Inside the European Union the picture is different but not necessarily more reassuring.

The largest single line item in 2025 was energy security: €33 billion, including a record €11–11.6 billion for electricity grids and storage.

Another €22 billion went to innovation and technology programmes, including the new TechEU initiative.

SMEs and mid-caps received €17.8 billion.

Sustainable cities, regions and housing absorbed around €20 billion.

The regional and cohesion spending is the part that makes the least obvious nonsense.

Building infrastructure and housing is something a normal development bank might do.

The problem is that almost none of it escapes the Green Deal paperwork and the accompanying regulatory requirements. The same money that theoretically helps regions catch up also forces them to comply with rules that raise costs and slow down everything else.

Europe’s competitiveness problem is not primarily a lack of subsidised housing. It is an excess of regulation dressed up as climate policy.

The EIB’s defenders will point out that most of the money stays inside Europe and that grids, innovation and cohesion are legitimate public policy goals.

They are not wrong. They are just describing a different institution from the one being sold to the public.

The EIB is presented as a smart investor and a geopolitical actor at the same time.

It cannot really be both without someone eventually noticing that the smart investor part is mostly optional.