By Africa Bazaar Staff Writer | Trade & Finance
Italy is turning its Africa strategy into hard contracts, and this time, the tractors are the headline.
SACE, the Italian export credit agency has backed a €100 million deal to supply agricultural machinery to Togo, sharpening Rome’s push to translate the Mattei Plan for Africa from policy into pipeline.
The transaction, finalized last month, sees SACE guarantee roughly €78.3 million in financing from Santander CIB to Togo’s Finance Ministry. The funds will support deliveries of tractors, plows and seeders to the country’s agriculture ministry—equipment aimed squarely at modernizing a sector still dominated by small-scale, low-mechanical farming.
Four Italian manufacturers: CNH Industrial, SDF S.p.A., Idrofoglia and Nardi Group anchor the supply chains, underscoring how Rome is using export financing to channel industrial policy abroad.
“We are proud to support a project with strong economic and social impact both for Togo and Italian exports in line with the Mattei Plan for Africa,” Carlo Escoffier, SACE’s West Africa representative said in a statement, pointing to efforts to embed Itakain companies into local value chains while pushing into new markets.
The deal is the latest in a string of transactions designed to operationalize the Mattei Plan—Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s flagship initiative to deepen Italy’s commercial and strategic footprint across Africa, particularly in energy, infrastructure, and agriculture.
A Senior Italian official discusses the Mattei Plan for Africa
It also builds directly on last year’s larger financing push when Cassa Depositi e Prestiti and SACE backed a €250 million facility for Africa Finance Corporation. That deal, tied to projects like the Lobito Corridor railway linking Angola to Central Africa’s copper belt, was explicitly structured to pull Italian suppliers into Africa’s infrastructure build-out.
Across Africa, food systems are under strain from a mix of climate shocks, inflation, and tighter global funds and governments are under pressure to increase domestic production quickly, while managing fiscal constraints and currency volatility—pushing food security from a development agenda to a national macroeconomic priority.
Not only that, but agriculture is also emerging as a key front in the global race to plant a geopolitical and commercial footprint on the African continent. Industrial Mechanization remains low across most nations on the continent, offering both development upside and a commercial opening for foreign manufacturers.
This underscores why SACR’s latest credit guarantees for Togo is not only a deal on paper, it is also a targeted intervention in one of Africa’s most constrained sectors.
In Togo, the agreement is designed to address those constraints directly. Agriculture employs a large share of the workforce but out our is held back by low equipment use and fragmented production.
The Togolese government is betting that centralized state-backed procurement of machinery can unlock productivity, accelerate the planting cycle, and improve yields, which have long been capped by structural limits.
The deal reveals a new model that shifts how mechanization is introduced. Rather than relying on individual farmers to finance equipment they cannot afford, the government is building shared capacity at scale—expanding access across farming communities and amplifying impact beyond isolated gains.
Experts say the transaction also reflects a broader move toward bundled, state-backed financing structures, where capital, equipment and policy alignment are deployed together, an approach increasingly used by external partners to scale projects while securing a commercial foothold in African markets.
But the model also carries trade-offs: Tied financing can accelerate deployment, but it can also lock countries into external suppliers and systems, they warned.
Whether deals like this build local ecosystems—maintenance networks, technical skills, supply chains— or simply deliver equipment will depend on the long-term impact.
