Patchwork in an interconnected world: the challenges of transport networks in Sub-Saharan Africa^*

* This paper is published under the sole responsibility of its authors and does not engage the European Commission.

ABSTRACT

Sub-Saharan Africa has recently undergone, or still do in many countries, a period of transport infrastructure expansion. Current policies are centred on the development of international links, which require large capital-intensive projects and are sometimes economically dubious. This paper reviews the past policies and transport functions since colonial times by placing them in their economic and political context. We find that present strategies have similarities to the ones prevailing in previous periods, where expansion phases dominated by transport-led economic growth theories were followed by a stagnation of Africa’s infrastructure development. In view of the challenges in translating findings from empirical research into right policies, we identify the potential of more balanced and sustainable strategic investments, notably by reinforcing the existing secondary transport networks converging into urban centres.

KEYWORDS:

• Transport
• road
• rail
• infrastructure
• Africa
• development

Acknowledgements

Authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable and constructive comments in revising the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Sergio Oliete Josa http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2337-4382

Francesc Magrinyà http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4638-0868

Notes

* This paper is published under the sole responsibility of its authors and does not engage the European Commission.

1. Plans to develop trans-African corridors are not a PIDA novelty. See, for instance, Comité de l’Alliance Internationale de Tourisme (1947) and UN-ECA and African Development Bank (2003).

2. “Second-nature geography concerns features that depend on the spatial interaction between people in an area but are not necessarily inherited”, and “third-nature geography concerns features of an area that are based on prior human intervention”.

3. This advance of Islam was limited to the south by the presence of the Tsetse fly (Bairoch, 1985).

4. This new development financial institution was created to complement the mission of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the first of the World Bank institutions established in 1944, which mainly offers non-concessional loans to middle-income developing countries. Instead, IDA provides grants or loans at highly concessional terms mainly to low-income countries.

5. The principle tenet is that road users should pay a fee separate from the government’s taxation, a fee that is usually paid through a levy included in the fuel price and transferred by petrol companies directly to the RMFs.

6. For instance, Sitglitz was senior Vice-President and Chief Economist at the World Bank from 1997 to 2000, Venables was the Chief Economist at the UK Department for International Development (DFID) from 2005 to 2008 and Collier was the Director of the Development Research Group of the World Bank from 1998 to 2003.

7. It is worthy of mention: Foster and Briceño-Garmendia (2010), Infrastructure Consortium for Africa (2014) and World Economic Forum (2013).