Burundi-DRC-Tanzania cross-border electrified railway to speed up intra-African trade
Burundi and Tanzania have floated a tender for designing and constructing about 282 kilometers of electrified railway, part of East Africa’s wider cross-border electric railway line plans aiming at boosting the competition for cargo business in the region and helping the region tap a US$3 trillion single market opportunity.
What will be the continent’s second multinational electrified railway is projected initially connect Burundi and Tanzania and pass through the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), as the countries look to tap the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), the world’s largest single market. The AfCFTA is set to combine Africa’s population of nearly 1.4. billion people and markets with a current combined GDP of over $3 trillion. The electrified Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) project will be implemented for a period of five years and, upon its completion, it is set to become Africa’s second cross-border electrified rail after Djibouti and Ethiopia launched the continent’s first fully electric multinational railway line, in 2016.
Funded to the tune of US$3.4 billion mainly by the China’s Exim Bank, the 750km-long Djibouti-Ethiopia line from the Red Sea port of Djibouti to Addis Ababa is still the longest of its kind on the continent. The tender document for the Tanzania-Burundi line indicates that both governments have applied for construction funding from the African Development Bank (ADB).
Tanzania has recently begun an aggressive pushed to modernize its railway infrastructure, revamping its aging regional rail networks to facilitate cross-border trade, including through the construction of a SGR network of 2,561 kilometers, linking Dar es Salaam to landlocked countries like the Burundi, DRC, Rwanda, and Uganda. With this investment, the East African country is looking to vault ahead of regional peers including the region’s largest economy, Kenya, by providing the most efficient trade routes in the bloc.
