The U.S. and China plan to spend billions of dollars refurbishing key railway lines in southern Africa that link critical resource mining hubs in Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo with ports on both sides of the continent.

For the U.S., it’s the Lobito Atlantic Railway that goes from the copper belt in Zambia 1,300km west across Angola to the Atlantic Ocean. However, China is looking in the other direction: proposing to spend upwards of a billion dollars to refurbish the TAZARA railway, which also begins in Zambia and heads almost 1,900km West to the Tanzanian port of Dar es Salam on the Indian Ocean.