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The Ugandan government signed an agreement with a Turkish construction firm to build a 272-kilometer section of the Uganda Standard Railway Network.
Transport often comes with high costs in many regions of Africa. Transportation bottlenecks cripple the economy and create scarcity and price rises. That is particularly true for Sub-Saharan Africa, where people mostly use road transport since other modes of transport are less developed. Also, a good number of landlocked countries are in Africa including Ethiopia and Uganda, which are large countries.
In countries such as Uganda, the private sector largely dominates transportation, resulting in high expenses for the public. Uganda’s transportation network faces difficulties due to congestion in Kampala and nearby regions. Many roads are either unpaved or filled with potholes. Traffic congestion is a daily affair affecting the timely movement of goods.
To address this perennial problem, the Ugandan government signed an agreement with a Turkish construction firm to build a 272-kilometer section of the Uganda Standard Railway Network. The landlocked country is looking for some relief following the signing of an engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) agreement between Uganda’s government and the Turkish company Yapı Merkezi.
This deal, valued at €2.7 billion, is aimed at constructing the Malaba-Kampala segment of the Uganda Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) over the next four years. The Standard Gauge Railway will become the backbone of the surface transport system and will tone up transport capacity in the country and region.
Uganda’s closest coastal port in Mombasa, Kenya, situated 1500 km away, is anticipated to increasingly shift towards an export-driven economy. The Uganda Standard Gauge Railway will connect Uganda’s capital Kampala to Kenya’s coastal port city of Mombasa. This project is part of a 1,724-kilometer Standard Gauge Railway designed to connect Uganda with four of its neighboring nations.
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While improving the train systems could significantly enhance the country’s economic growth, Uganda is struggling to finance the almost USD 3 billion needed for construction over the next four years due to increasing public debt.
