A Cabanga Africa Publication
Africa Thinks Here
On-the-ground business intelligence in South Africa & Eswatini, since July 2019.
Section
SADC's corridor and infrastructure agenda runs on thousands of local contractors, materials suppliers, haulage operators and logistics agents who feed the ports, rail links, power projects and border posts that regional planners describe as an integrated system....
An industrial strategy that targets a rise in manufactured exports from roughly 3% to 50% of the total by 2030 is, whether or not its authors describe it this way, an infrastructure strategy. Value chains do not move on policy language; they move on corridors, ports,...
An industrialisation strategy that targets a 30% manufacturing employment share and 50% manufactured exports cannot be delivered from existing regional infrastructure alone. Factories, agro-processing plants and pharmaceutical manufacturing lines need serviced...
A protocol can declare a transport corridor open for investment on paper long before a single truck, train or fibre-optic cable crosses the border it was written to serve. That gap between policy declaration and physical network is the central question raised by...
A regional power utility can forecast a drought a season out. A road agency planning a 15-year corridor upgrade cannot say, with any confidence, whether the rainfall pattern its bridge culverts were sized for in 2005 still holds today. That mismatch — short-cycle...
A factory needs power, water, a road to a port, and a customs post that does not add a week to every consignment. SADC's first Industrialisation Week, which opened in Mbabane, Swaziland, on 23 August 2016 alongside the 36th SADC Heads of State and Government...
A bridge is a single structure. A functioning trade corridor is a system of bridges, roads, rail links, ports, power connections and border facilities that all have to work together, on schedule, for any one component's economic value to be realised. The...