Transport

One major advantage of the $8bn expansion of the Suez Canal will be the scope for increased revenues, with the new shipping lane allowing for a sizeable increase in traffic transiting the canal.

While the Suez Canal expansion has attracted most of the headlines, Egypt’s National Road Project offers perhaps even greater benefits to the broader economy, given that more than 90% of the country’s freight moves by road. As of 2012 Egypt had 121.4m km of roads, according to the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics. Some 90...

Cairo’s traffic problems are notorious, and while they are a useful way to spark a conversation with locals, they have a major impact on the economy. Due to the costs associated with congestion and time wasted on the road, Egypt’s traffic jams are estimated to reduce GDP growth by 4 percentage points, according to a 2010 World Bank study....

As the Arab world’s most populous country, and one of its largest economies, Egypt has always had to work overtime to ensure that infrastructure capacity keeps up with demand. While the past few years of political and economic uncertainty have slowed capital spending on infrastructure, 2015 has seen that trend reversed in dramatic fashion,...

Kenya has been making considerable headway over the past two years on a development agenda designed to strengthen the country’s position as a leading regional transport and logistics centre for the East Africa region. This is in spite of an infrastructure deficit which, according to the World Bank’s “Kenya Public Expenditure Review”, is...

With a fast-growing population, rising congestion and densely-populated urban areas, developing solutions for transport has become a necessity in several Algerian cities. Since 2003 the government has been working to implement a vast and ambitious urban transport development programme, with a total cost of nearly €9bn. Despite budgetary...