During a meeting with the Rwandan ambassador, Minister of Transport Kamel al-Wazir announced on Wednesday that Qalaa Holdings will construct a railway line between Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam Port and Burundi via Rwanda’s Kigali, and another between Kenya’s Mombasa Port and Uganda.
Rwanda is a landlocked country that depends on Kenya’s Mombasa Port and Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam Port for imports and exports, and therefore, the meeting explored the possibility of establishing a logistics zone in Rwanda to store Egyptian exports.
The minister also emphasized the importance of the Vic-Med project, which aims to link Lake Victoria with the Mediterranean through the 11 Nile Basin countries, including Rwanda. The project will require rehabilitating 6,600 kilometers of waterway, constructing several infrastructure projects to overcome natural obstacles, rehabilitating existing inland ports, building new ones, introducing multimodal transport in some areas, establishing vocational training centers specializing in inland transport, and modernizing fleets of member states.
Furthermore, various countries, including Rwanda, will be linked to the Cairo-Cape Town Road, which Egypt plans to establish to enhance trade between African states. The road will span 10,228 kilometers, including 1,155 kilometers in Egypt, crossing nine countries: Egypt, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.
The minister and the ambassador also discussed cooperation in human capacity-building, technical collaboration in constructing roads and bridges, and enhancing trade exchange leveraging the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), which came into effect in 2019.
