Features
10 Dec 20

Why Africa’s road works promise a Golden Age of Mobility

It’s not yet complete, but the road corridor between Côte d’Ivoire and Mali is already paying an economic dividend. It’s just one many mobility infrastructure projects sponsored by the African Development Bank (AfDB), with the potential to transform the formerly poor connections between the continent’s countries into vectors of rapid, solid growth.

Work on the 1,000 km stretch between Bamako, the capital of Mali, and the Ivorian port city of San Pedro, is on schedule to be completed by June next year. 

$233 million

But the project, which was financed by the AfDB for a total of $233 million, is already earning back its cost. According to an AfDB report from 27 October, travel times on a 140-km stretch from the Malian city of Zantiébougou to the Ivorian border has been reduced from six hours in 2014 to two hours last May. These and other efficiency gains are already worth $3.6 million per year for local transporters. 

A related project, upgrading the customs computer systems at the port of San Pedro, will reduce processing time for container traffic from 10 days in 2014 to soon no more than three days. Similarly, the construction of a single border checkpoint will reduce the waiting time for goods trucks on the Ivorian-Malian border from an entire day to just three hours. 

Three-axled vehicles

The ongoing improvements in mobility infrastructure have already halved the operating cost for three-axled vehicles on the Bamako-San Pedro Corridor from $1.8/km to less than $0.90/km. “At the end of the works, the project will enable an increase in the (annual) volume of trade crossing the border from 59,200 to 382,400 tonnes,” the report predicts. 

The Bamako-San Pedro Corridor is just one of many cross-border road corridors that the AfDB is working to improve. Africa is perhaps the continent most in need of a major upgrade of its road infrastructure. Improved connectivity reduces the cost of transport, thereby boosting international and intra-regional trade, attracting foreign investments and ultimately lifting the adjacent populations from poverty into prosperity. 

Integrating Africa

That’s why the quest to integrate Africa is one of the AfDB’s strategic priorities. Over the past 12 years, the bank has financed regional infrastructure projects to the tune of nearly $8 billion, resulting in nearly 13,000 km of regional highways along 17 road corridors, including 26 one-stop border facilities. 

Past successes include the Bamako-Dakar Highway, which now carries more than 50% of Mali’s import and export goods, boosting international trade by 10%. The Nacala Corridor, connecting Zambia and Malawi to Mozambique, causing the port of Nacala to grow by more than 6% between 2012 and 2016. And the Mombasa-Nairobi-Addis Ababa Corridor, which has increased bilateral trade between Kenya and Ethiopia by 400%.

Trans-African Highways

Additionally, the AfDB is collaborating with the African Union, the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and various regional economic communities across Africa in establishing a truly continent-spanning road network. This system of nine Trans-African Highways will connect Cairo to Dakar (1), Algiers to Lagos (2), Tripoli to Cape Town (3), Cairo to Cape Town (4), Dakar to N’Djamena (5), N’Djamena to Djibouti (6), Dakar to Lagos (7), Lagos to Mombasa (8) and Beira to Lobito (9). 

This will make it possible and practical to use ground transport to criss-cross the entire African continent from north to south and east to west. Considering the economic benefits already generated by the AfDB-sponsored infrastructure projects, now is the time for corporates to include Africa into their calculations. For, as proved by the Bamako-San Pedro Corridor and others, Africa’s Golden Age of Mobility will manifest itself first and foremost as a period of strong economic growth. 

More on the AfDB’s road infrastructure sponsorship here.

Image: AfDB

Authored by: Frank Jacobs