Africa Finance Corp. plans to invest more than $3 billion in projects across the continent next year to boost the region’s appeal as a source of key metals and help it gear up for more open trade.

The Lagos-based institution set up in 2007 by African nations will prioritize advancing existing projects including the multimillion-dollar railway linking mines in Zambia to the port of Lobito in Angola, Chief Executive Officer Samaila Zubairu said. It’s also looking for agricultural, electrification, eco-tourism, food-security and renewable-energy projects, he said.

“Our aspiration is to continue to support the build-out of the infrastructure that will enable Africa to industrialize, help us address our challenges of poverty, inequality and unemployment and we can only do that by creating jobs,” he said in an interview on Bloomberg Television.

Africa represents a “significant investment proposition” for countries and regions such as the US, India, European Union and the Persian Gulf because of its abundance of minerals, metals and renewable energy, Zubairu said. The African Continental Free Trade Area, which aims to fully integrate the region into a single market, contains 1.3 billion people with a combined gross domestic product of $3.4 trillion.

“We’re going to need 2 million trucks” for the trade area, Zubairu said. “Our plan is not to use diesel trucks — we’d like to use electric trucks. We have the whole battery-minerals value chain here. We’re looking at how to produce battery process here, and eventually we’ll do cells.”