Category: Infrastructure

The investigative series Africa Uncensored broadcast a riveting one-hour documentary on Kenyan national TV last night that explored the country's ballooning national debt. The program highlighted how, as Kenya's largest bilateral creditor owning an estimated 70% (or $6.2 billion) of its ...

Passengers have had a week to try out Nigeria's brand new Chinese-built standard gauge railway that links Lagos to Ibadan. The new service is operating on a limited schedule with just two trains a day but that'll expand to 16 daily departures shortly once construction of the ...

The newest Chinese-built railway in Africa is now officially in service following a Tweet on Monday from the office of Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari that launched the new Lagos to Ibadan line. The $1.59 billion standard gauge railway was 

The Chinese-financed and constructed Ethiopia-Djibouti standard gauge railway is bleeding money due to rampant theft and vandalism, according to a report in the Addis Standard newspaper. The situation is now so bad, say company officials, that the trains have been forced to reduce their speed ...

The China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC), a Chinese state-owned construction company, is forecast to earn almost a billion dollars in profits over the 27 years that it will operate the new Nairobi Expressway that's now under construction.  Details of the ...

Critics of Kenya's multi-billion-dollar Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) definitely have the upper hand these days as the railway sinks deeper into debt. But George Sunguh, managing editor of African Ports Review, argued today in Business Daily that the skeptics are wrong.

Travelers are making their way back to Kenya's Standard Gauge Railways, especially the line between Nairobi and the port city of Mombasa, according to new data published by the Kenya Railways Corporation (KRC). 43,235 people took the Mombasa ...

The Ugandan government is reportedly in talks with the China Exim Bank to secure a $2 billion loan to build a new Standard Gauge Railway, according to the Daily Monitor newspaper.  The head of Uganda Railways Corporation, Stanley ...

Recently we've seen two new pieces of research on Kenya’s Standard Gauge Railway (SGR,) which make for fascinating – if depressing – reading. They show that the project was doomed from the start by corruption and bad dealing from ...

Back in August, the Ugandan government asked the China Exim Bank for a repayment delay on the loans needed to build the $1.7 billion Karuma dam project. A week went by and the bank replied with a simple answer: no. The government had requested the repayment delay ...

Kenya's new multi-billion dollar standard gauge railway (SGR) was destined to fail even before it launched, argued Kenyan legal scholar Luis Franceschi in a new opinion column in the Nation newspaper. Franceschi joins a growing number of analysts who have long asserted that ...

Kenya is rapidly becoming the next flashpoint in the Africa debt crisis amid a dramatic increase in borrowing that threatens to submerge the economy. The Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) warned on Friday that the country's ballooning debt is ...