Bring on the boats

 

“Back in April 2024 a 188-seat passenger ferry arrived at the port of Djibouti, where it was put on a trailer and dragged across a desert. After manoeuvring through dozens of crowded towns, squeezing under overpasses and snapping power lines, it arrived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. Having been hauled north across rebel-infested mountains, in August 2025 it reached Lake Tana, where it is supposed to ferry tourists to and from a glitzy resort built by Abiy Ahmed, the prime minister.

 

Ethiopia’s state media hailed the end of the ship’s odyssey as a national triumph, but the region around Lake Tana has been buffeted by an insurgency since 2023. So the ferry’s seats have remained empty. Yet despite its apparent absurdity, its journey is a reminder of how few modern boats ply African waterways, and how much richer the continent could be if there were more.

 

Moving goods and people by water is much cheaper than by land, with transport costs on inland waterways estimated to be between 30% and 60% lower than bulk transport by road and rail.

 

 Yet in Africa roughly 80% of freight travels at great cost by road, compared with 45% in America and 25% in Europe.

 

Partly as a result, transport costs in Africa can be up to five times higher than in America. Only 16% of Africa’s trade is intra-regional, compared with 58% in Asia and 67% in Europe.

 

In part, Africa’s dearth of water-based transport reflects the difficulty of transporting boats inland; shipbuilding capacity on the continent is negligible. Large vessels are usually disassembled before travelling overland. This avoids odysseys like that of the Ethiopian ferry. But reassembling the vessels before launching them into the water raises costs still more.

 

Geography complicates things. Unlike in Europe, Africa’s longest river systems are not connected to each other (see map). Cataracts, rapids and other obstacles impede navigation, especially for larger cargo ships. Colonial rulers built infrastructure to extract resources from the continent, not to encourage intra-African trade.

 

Post-colonial leaders have done little to reverse this. In Nigeria, for instance, they might have dredged the Niger river and built canals to connect its tributaries, creating a network of waterways spanning 28 of the country’s 36 states. Such a project, says Lanre Badmus of the World Association for Waterborne Transport Infrastructure, would be both transformative and cheaper than building more roads.

 

Even where waterways are navigable, waterborne transport has atrophied. Maritime infrastructure in the Great Lakes region has been neglected for decades, says Andrew Mold, eastern Africa director at the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Those lakes connect ten countries with a combined population of 520m, so the lost opportunities for trade are substantial. With decent infrastructure Burundi, for instance, could import maize from Zambia via Lake Tanganyika. Today it largely comes by road, tripling transport costs.

 

Similar stories can be found across Africa. Decades of conflict in South Sudan have destroyed its river transport and ruined trade along the Nile. South Sudanese joke that theirs is the only section of the river “where fish die of old age”. Yet things are hardly better upstream. Once the dominant mode of transport in Egypt, the Nile now carries less than 1% of the country’s internal trade. Since 2014 Egypt has built more than 6,300km of roads while leaving its river ports to rot. At least one major dam has no lock to let ships pass.

 

But the tide may be turning. The African Development Bank is pushing a $12bn plan for a water-transport corridor from Lake Victoria to Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. Uganda recently began to import fuel from Kenya via Lake Victoria, thanks to a new pipeline from the coast to Kenya’s lakeside city of Kisumu. East African countries want to harmonise policies, renovate ports and revitalise trade on the Great Lakes. Such schemes face big challenges, from inter-state conflict to financial constraints. But they could make waves.” [1]

 

1. Bring on the boats. The Economist; London Vol. 458, Iss. 9480,  (Jan 3, 2026): 34, 35.