JAMAICA | The Afreximbank Question: What Has Jamaica Actually Borrowed?

A year after Jamaica joined Africa’s biggest trade bank to headlines about billions, the bank’s own audited accounts tell a much quieter story. Nobody has asked the obvious question out loud — including this newspaper, which got part of it wrong.

KINGSTON, Jamaica, August 31, 2026 | By Calvin G. Brown — On 2 June, at the AC Hotel by Marriott in Kingston, Finance and Public Service Minister Fayval Williams told an Afreximbank roadshow that the partnership between the bank and Jamaica was clearly continuing to strengthen.

Strengthening implies there is something already there to strengthen. Jamaica had signed the Partnership Agreement — the instrument by which CARICOM states join the African Export-Import Bank — on 8 July 2025, almost eleven months earlier. Yet the bank’s own release described that June event as an inaugural roadshow, one that put its financing, trade facilitation and investment products in front of the Jamaican market for the first time.

That is a salesman opening his case. It is not a lender walking a client through a book of business.

Where the billions came from

In late February, at CARICOM’s 50th Heads of Government meeting in Basseterre, Afreximbank president Dr George Elombi announced the headline figure everybody has been repeating since. The bank would lift its global limit for the region from US$3 billion to US$5 billion, he said, in the hope of seeing it fully used over the next three to four years.

Read that last clause again, because it does a lot of work. A limit is a permission, not a payment.

A ceiling is the credit limit on the card. It is not the balance. And the two get quoted as though they are the same thing.

What the audited books say

There is one place where the guesswork stops: the audited consolidated financial statements attached to Afreximbank’s Annual Report 2025. Note 9.3.5 breaks the loan book down by the country where the borrower lives. The row marked CARICOM reads US$161,299 thousand — US$161.3 million. The bank’s own table puts that at 0.4 per cent of its US$35.66 billion in gross loans and advances.

The year before, the same row read US$42.0 million, or 0.1 per cent. So the region has grown almost fourfold in a year. That is real movement, and it deserves saying plainly.

It is also 3.2 per cent of five billion.

Two cautions here, because the bank is owed both. First, US$161.3 million is a CARICOM figure, not a Jamaican one; Afreximbank publishes no country-by-country breakdown within CARICOM. Second, it is a balance outstanding on a single date, not a running total of everything ever lent. Money borrowed and repaid drops off the balance sheet, and the largest Caribbean deal on the list was one the bank arranged for a syndicate rather than carried alone.

With all of that conceded, it remains the only audited CARICOM number in existence.

And the bank’s other 2025 figures fit around it neatly. Its Caribbean Branch Office reports more than US$173 million disbursed across the region. Set that against a US$119.3 million rise in the outstanding balance and you get roughly US$54 million of repayments. The arithmetic holds.

The deals it names — and the one it doesn’t

The same section of the report names the transactions. Suriname: US$1.6 billion for the state energy company in June 2025. The Bahamas: a US$200 million framework agreement with the government, under which US$108 million of an approved US$140 million has already been disbursed. Grenada: US$30 million to a hospitality company.

Jamaica appears in none of it.

That disposes of the defence one would normally expect — that development banks simply do not publish country-level numbers. This one does. To the nearest million for The Bahamas. And for Grenada, an economy considerably smaller than Jamaica’s.

Five mentions in 248 pages

Jamaica’s name turns up five times in the entire 248-page report: for acceding, for not ratifying, and for a hurricane grant. In a year in which it was a member for under six months, that is not damning on its own.

The second of those mentions, though, points at Kingston rather than Cairo. Of the 13 countries, the report says, 11 had ratified the Partnership Agreement; Haiti and Jamaica had yet to complete the process. That status is as at 31 December 2025. Nothing on the Jamaica Information Service site records a ratification since, and two further government searches failed their own controls.

This matters because the bank has tied money to membership before. When it announced Jamaica’s accession in July 2025, it made the earlier increase — the one to US$3 billion — conditional on full CARICOM membership.

There is a second, more practical brake, and a bank executive named it in Kingston. Afreximbank’s Group Managing Director for Client Relations and Regional Office Operations, Eric Monchu Intong, told the Jamaica Information Service that the bank cannot lend to a government or a corporate without working through local banks — its role, he said, is to complement what they already do. In other words, somebody in Jamaica has to bring the deal.

The number that shrank

Afreximbank’s own account of the regional total has moved. Its 2 March release said the new ceiling was built on more than US$750 million already disbursed across the region, plus a pipeline of over US$2 billion under execution. Three months later in Kingston, Intong put regional disbursement at over US$500 million, with a further US$700 million committed — as reported by Jamaica Observer columnist Keith Collister.

The lower figure does not strictly contradict the higher one. But it is markedly more conservative, it came from a named executive, and it came three months later. Both numbers belong to Afreximbank, nothing published reconciles them, and neither has been audited.

Where this publication got it wrong

WiredJa has a stake in this, and it is not a flattering one.

On 9 April, under this writer’s byline, we ran a piece headlined “Afreximbank’s CARICOM Facility Hits US$750M Disbursed…”, and told readers the headline numbers were no longer aspirational. They were a press-release claim. The audited book at the balance-sheet date three months earlier stood at US$161.3 million.

The piece also credited the US$750 million to Dr Elombi’s Basseterre address. It sits in the opening paragraph of the release, not in anything he was quoted as saying. And it printed as a direct quotation a phrase — “embedded economic cooperation” — that this paper cannot find in the annual report or in any source it holds.

The US$1.5 billion that was never Jamaica’s alone

One Jamaica-specific financing figure does circulate. Writing in the Observer of 17 June, Collister said Jamaica’s participation had unlocked the increase to US$5 billion, including what appeared to be an allocation of up to US$1.5 billion for Jamaica. He hedged it carefully, and his remains the most informative Jamaican reporting on the subject.

But the bank’s July 2025 release says the move unlocks an additional US$1.5 billion in financing for Jamaica and other Caribbean economies. That is the regional increment — the step from US$1.5 billion to US$3 billion. It was never a Jamaican envelope.

Jamaica’s own books are silent too

If money were flowing, the Ministry of Finance would ordinarily leave fingerprints. WiredJa downloaded the four current Fiscal Policy Papers and searched the text. “Afrexim” appears zero times in all four. So does “African Export”.

These documents are not shy about naming lenders: an external-financier table lists the Inter-American Development Bank, the IBRD, the Caribbean Development Bank and China Exim Bank. A search of the Ministry of Finance website for “Afreximbank” returns the same no-results page as a string of nonsense. A JIS search returns five items — four news reports and a studio segment — and not one of the reports is a financing announcement.

The only Afreximbank money we can trace

There is one Jamaican figure: US$600,000. It is Jamaica’s share of a US$1.1 million Afreximbank donation towards Hurricane Melissa recovery, announced from Cairo on 12 December 2025, with US$500,000 going to Haiti.

A humanitarian grant, in other words. Not a drawdown. And the only Afreximbank money publicly documented as reaching Jamaica.

Set that against the promise. Announcing the accession on 11 July 2025, the bank quoted Prime Minister Andrew Holness describing it as a significant and strategic step that strengthens Jamaica’s ability to access increased trade financing, investment support and technical assistance. Every word of that is a promise of access. It commits no sum. And none has been published since.

One sentence, unasked

The bank’s half-year results, published on 24 August, contain no Caribbean line item at all.

None of this establishes that Jamaica has drawn nothing. An unpublished figure is not a zero, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. The likeliest explanation is also the plainest — that there is no Jamaican transaction to announce — but that is an inference, not a finding.

What can be said with confidence is that nobody has asked in public. Afreximbank has not been put on the record about what Jamaica has actually drawn. Not by the ministry. And not by this paper, which has not approached it either.

The question is one sentence long. It should be put to the bank — and to the government that signed.

— 30 —