Benin has opened its first 18-hole golf course, Ouidah Golf Club, in the town of Avlékété west of Cotonou, as part of a wider push to diversify an economy long reliant on raw agricultural exports, Golf Course Architecture reported.
The course was designed by architect Jeremy Pern and built by Gregori International on a 100-hectare site near the Gulf of Guinea, with the shoreline only a few hundred metres from the opening hole. Golf development forms part of a broader national strategy that has already produced the Glo-Djigbé Industrial Zone, a 1,600-hectare manufacturing hub that has attracted more than $1bn in foreign investment and created over 16,000 jobs since opening in 2022, alongside a five-year modernisation of the Port of Cotonou.
Joan Dessaint Fomi, a director at ANPT, Benin’s national tourism and heritage agency, said the project was designed to be closely connected to the local territory, identity and community, adding that the aim was to “strengthen the appeal of Benin as a tourism destination,” Golf Course Architecture reported.
The site presented unusual design constraints, including several voodoo shrines and a 1.2-acre sacred grove dedicated to the local fishing community, which was retained as an out-of-bounds area within the course routing. Much of the land sat less than half a metre above the wet season’s high-water mark, prompting the excavation of roughly 500,000 cubic metres of sand to raise playing areas at least 1.5 metres above water level as a safeguard against rising sea levels.
Fomi said the club was not intended solely for tourists or high-income players, pointing to plans for training local golfers and forming partnerships with schools to build long-term participation in the sport in Benin. Construction was completed in under two years, a notably fast timeline for a national golf project of this scale.