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lobalization and regional integration require effective regional infrastructure—transport, communications, and energy—to widen and integrate markets, achieve economies of scale, encourage participation of the private sector, and attract foreign direct investment and technology. Infrastructure development is included in the treaties of all the African regional economic communities, which provide the best framework for aligning sectoral policies, designing regional master plans, harmonizing regulatory regimes and investment codes, attracting seed capital, and mobilizing invest-ment resources. Yet despite efforts to integrate transport, communications, and energy, gaps still exist in infrastructure and services across regional economic communities and across Africa—raising the cost of doing business and impeding factor mobility, invest-ment, and competitiveness.
The need is for sustainable infrastructure systems that meet economic demand and pro-vide basic social services, especially for poor people. These infrastructure systems must be safe, reliable, efficient, affordable, and environmentally sound, and they should help the least developed and landlocked countries compete in regional and international markets. To meet these requirements, governments must concentrate on policy and reg-ulation, reduce their interference in the management of infrastructure services, and devise appropriate regulatory frameworks for monitoring performance and liberalizing access to infrastructure service markets.
The regional economic communities want to cooperate on infrastructure and services, but they lack the capacity and resources to do so. Recent initiatives such as the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and the successors to the global programmes of the United Nations Transport and Communications Decade for Africa (UNTACDA) could provide the driving force for more capital-intensive infrastructure development.
Transport
The indicators used to measure the performance of the regional economic communi-ties in transport integration (figure 7.1) are physical integration, policy convergence, operational issues, and the African regional institutions and initiatives.
All the regional economic communities want an efficient, integrated transport system to facilitate national and international traffic and to foster trade and factor mobility.
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Despite their efforts, problems remain: missing links, insufficient competition, high transport costs, few harmonized rules and procedures, inadequate safety and security at national and regional levels, little cross-border investment and private sector partic-ipation, and failure to ratify and implement conventions and regional policies adopted at sectoral meetings.
In general, the physical links in Africa fall well short of expectations: the African net-work of infrastructure and services is still very disjointed. Transport costs are among the highest in the world, which means a high cost of doing business and products that are not very competitive in international markets. For landlocked countries transport costs can reach as high as 77% of the value of exports. Along the West African road corridors linking the ports of Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire), Accra (Ghana), Cotonou (Benin), Dakar (Senegal), and Lomé (Togo) to Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, truck-ers paid $322 million in undue costs at police, customs, and gendarmerie checkpoints in 1997, partially because the Inter-State Road Transportation Convention had not been implemented (UNECA 2002a). Shipping a car from Japan to Abidjan costs
$1,500 (including insurance); shipping that same car from Addis Ababa to Abidjan costs $5,000.
The last evaluation for UNTACDA II indicated that roads remain the dominant mode of transport in Africa, accounting for 90% of interurban transport. Less than a third (62,000 kilometres, or 27.6%) of Africa’s 2 million kilometres of roads are asphalted. At 6.84 kilo-metres per 100 square kilokilo-metres, road density is well below that in Latin America (12 kilometres per 100 square kilometres) and Asia (18 kilometres per 100 square kilometres).
And African network distribution is low, at only 2.71 kilometres per 10,000 people.
90 100 110 120 130 140
1999 1998
1997 1996
1995 1994
Source: Economic Commission for Africa, from official sources.
Figure 7.1
Transport integration index, 1994–99 (Index 1994=100) The African network
of infrastructure and services is still very disjointed
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Cumbersome administrative procedures and poor facilities in transit countries have been detrimental to the international trade of Africa’s 15 landlocked countries. Several transit corridors have been identified to ease bottlenecks, and landlocked countries have negotiated bilateral and multilateral agreements with their coastal neighbours to facil-itate movement of goods and people. Implementation has been slow, however, because some provisions are in conflict with national laws and regulations. For example, there is need to harmonize and enforce axle load limits along the corridors.
The African rail network is an estimated 89,380 kilometres long, with a density of 2.96 kilometres per 1,000 square kilometres. Network connections are poor, especially in Central and West Africa, and the availability of rolling stock is still very low compared with other regions of the world. In the past decade African countries have introduced railway concessions to reduce the government’s role in railway management and to improve performance, but success has been limited. All the railway networks in Africa, including interconnected ones, still need to harmonize their operating rules and tech-nical standards.
Maritime transport accounts for 92–97% of Africa’s international trade. The tonnage carried by Africa’s merchant fleet decreased from 7.3 million deadweight tons in 1990 (1.1% of the global total) to 6.1 million deadweight tons in 1999 (0.8% of the global total). Over the same period the tonnage carried by the global merchant fleet increased from 618.4 million deadweight tons to 799.0 million deadweight tons. Declines occurred in all categories of African ships except container vessels, whose share has increased since 1995, peaking at 15% of global tonnage carried in 1997. In 2000 the average age of the African merchant fleet was 19 years, compared with the world aver-age of 14 years. But the African container fleet’s averaver-age aver-age of 11 years is much closer to the global average of 10 years.
Africa has about 80 major ports, with facilities ranging from conventional berths to container, bulk cargo, and white and crude oils. In 1999 African ports loaded 9.8% and offloaded 4% of the 5.2 billion tons of cargo handled in the world. Global container traffic has been growing since 1997 at 6.7%, with developing countries accounting for 1.6%. Only nine countries in Africa have recorded double digit growth in container traffic. Only a few countries have begun to commercialize their port operations and management, and most are still state-owned.
Air transport can create effective links among African countries and between Africa and the rest of the world. Each subregion has a number of national airlines, and jointly operated airlines ensure physical links in some cases. But the links among subregions have been poor because of the lack of appropriate policy for regulating the air trans-port industry until the 1999 Yamoussoukro Decision of the Conference of the Heads of State and Government. The decision accelerated liberalization of access to the air transport market in Africa and prompted reforms of airport and air space management aimed at boosting competition.
Cumbersome administrative procedures and poor facilities in transit countries have been detrimental to the international trade of Africa’s 15 landlocked countries
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Africa’s share of world air traffic was stagnant at about 1% despite a boom in interna-tional and intra-African traffic during the 1990s. Africa’s passenger load factor exceeded that of Latin America and the Caribbean but remained about 12% below the world average. The freight-loading coefficient is estimated at 20% below the world average. Regional alliances have been formed to improve airline operations, but Africa still has fewer alliances than Latin America. Many countries have created autonomous civil aviation authorities and begun the concession of their airports. Liberalization has prompted private sector interest in investing in airline and airspace management, lead-ing some regional organizations and countries to invest further financial resources in improving air navigation services.
Multimodal transport is governed by the United Nations International Convention on Multimodal Transport, signed in May 1981 but not yet in force because only 10 coun-tries, including 5 in Africa, of the required 30 have ratified the convention. The mem-bers of the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) have adopted their own multimodal convention for regulating multimodal transport among member states. But CEMAC countries that have signed the convention have not yet incorporated its provisions into their national laws.
The biggest developments in multimodal transport in Africa during the 1990s were the establishment of inland container depots to serve landlocked countries and the growth of containerization, particularly in Southern Africa. Special attention should be paid to ratification and accession to international treaties and conventions on multimodal trans-port, application and use of international container terminals, support for corridor devel-opment initiatives, and establishment of indigenous multimodal transport operators.
To address these transport problems, regional economic communities are focusing on:
• Strengthening physical integration through network coordination to link the main cities of member countries and to cater to the goods and services they produce.
• Preparing and implementing harmonized laws, standards, regulations, and proce-dures to ensure the smooth flow of goods and services and to reduce transport costs.
• Facilitating the development of human resources and institutions through training.
• Promoting public-private partnerships in infrastructure development and mobi-lizing resources by creating awareness and organizing investment forums and con-sultative meetings with donors.
• Exchanging information on best practices and common issues such as technology development by organizing special forums.
• Promoting the development of transit corridors to benefit landlocked countries by adopting measures to facilitate development and raise awareness.