Africa's Next Generation of Trade Corridors

Corridor programmes tend to be assembled as a portfolio. A port expansion here, a rail rehabilitation there, an inland platform, a border post. Each one is appraised on its own merits and each one may well be justified. The corridor can still underperform every projection made for it.

Shippers never experience an asset. They experience how long it took and whether that can be relied on next month. Both are usually decided at the joins. The transfer between modes. The handover between operators. The paperwork at a border. A terminal that closes at six and a railway that arrives at seven.

Designing for the joints

Design for the joins and the sequencing question changes. The first investment stops being the largest one and becomes whichever one unlocks the flow. Often it is a procedure or an agreement, not a structure, which makes it cheap and unpopular in equal measure.

• Where is time actually lost across the full door-to-door chain?
• Which segments are capacity-constrained and which are process-constrained?
• Who is accountable for the corridor as a whole, and with what authority?
• What volume is required to make a rail service viable, and does it exist?
• Which interventions unlock the others, and which can safely wait?

More corridors are held back by what will not talk to each other than by what has not been built.

The regional dimension

For a landlocked economy this stops being a logistics question. It sets whether industry is viable at all and what a household pays for imported goods. Which sharpens the institutional problem, because corridors cross borders and the bodies governing them usually do not.

The corridors that matter over the next decade probably will not be the ones with the largest capital programmes. They will be the ones where somebody credible holds the whole chain, sequences it honestly, and is willing to fix the joins before adding capacity nobody can yet use.