The IFC Is Putting Up to 80 Million Dollars Behind a Second Sheraton in Addis

Construction has started on a new Sheraton-branded hotel inside the Sheraton Addis compound, and the International Finance Corporation has disclosed proposed financing of up to 80 million US dollars for MIDROC Ethiopia Plc.

The total estimated cost is up to 116 million dollars. The financing is designed to provide longer-term foreign currency funding.

Who is building it

DEZACON Construction is the builder and ZIAS Architecture & Engineering the designer. ORC and SHC are named as consultants, with ELIMI as contractor.

The number that matters is not 80 million

It is the word forex.

An 80 million dollar facility from the World Bank Group's private-sector arm, explicitly structured as longer-term foreign currency funding, is addressing the constraint that has stalled large hospitality and real estate projects in Ethiopia for years. The construction cost is in dollars — fittings, lifts, kitchen plant, curtain wall — and the revenue, until the rooms fill with foreign guests, is substantially in birr. Projects die in that mismatch.

Dollar financing at multilateral tenor is the only instrument that bridges it, and there is very little of it available to Ethiopian private borrowers. That the IFC is proposing this scale for a domestic group is a signal about the institution's current read on Ethiopian private credit, quite apart from the hotel.

Timing

Addis has been adding room capacity against a diplomatic and conference calendar that keeps growing, and a second Sheraton-branded property inside the existing compound is a bet that premium demand in the city is deep enough to support two.

That bet is not obviously safe. Upper-tier occupancy in Addis is driven by institutional traffic — the African Union, the UN agencies, the conference circuit — rather than by leisure, and institutional traffic is exactly the demand most exposed to how the region's politics run over the next five years.

Open

The IFC financing is disclosed as proposed, not committed, and the disclosure refers to supporting "both projects" without the second being identified publicly. MIDROC has not announced a room count, a brand tier, an operator agreement or a completion date, and the split between debt and equity in the 116 million dollar total has not been published.

Sources: Addis Fortune, 26 October 2026