Zambia’s infrastructure and its cross-border connections will be a key focus of the North-South Corridor, on which donors pledged to spend $1.2bn at a conference in Lusaka in early April. Key projects are the upgrading of 4,000 km of roads, 600 km of railways and a speed-up in the generation of some 35,000 MW of power capacity through the Southern African Power Pool.


 

Following his government’s pledge of $150m, British trade and development minister Gareth Thomas told The Africa Report: “This pioneering initiative will make a difference to millions of people… enabling them to travel more easily, have better access to food, goods and services, and compete in the global market.”


 

One of the first projects will be the opening of a pilot ‘one-stop border post’ at Chirundu, on the Zambia-Zimbabwe border, to try to halve the current ten-day waiting time for trucks. Following the building of a new bridge over the Zambezi River, the two governments have passed legislation for a single operating procedure, so that documentation will soon only need to be submitted once.


 

Zambia has equally important cross-border trade with Democratic Republic of Congo and Tanzania, both of which can expect some benefits, as their own internal road and rail systems could do with serious rehabilitation.

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