All roads lead to Cairo. Industry Minister Kamel El Wazir yesterday described the under-construction 2.6k land route between Egypt and Chad as a strategic axis that will open up “new horizons for intra-regional trade,” according to a ministry statement. The route through the Libyan desert connects landlocked Chad and its surplus of livestock to Egypt’s growing appetite on account of its population and even hungrier Egyptian businesspeople in search of attractive investment possibilities.

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Work on the Egyptian side is already underway, with the state’s Arab Contractors having built 15% of the 370 km section between East Oweinat and the Libyan border, according to El Wazir. Arab Contractors are also set to study the 390 km part of the route through Libya and have inked two agreements with the Chadian government for two stretches stretching 1360 km all the way to N’Djamena.

The route is set to be a big boost for Chad’s economy, opening up a quicker route to the sea for the landlocked country. Bridging the Libyan desert has the potentially to effectively connect the central African nation to economies across North Africa opening options also outside Egypt for import, export, and investment,

The route also gives Chad the chance to capitalize on its plentiful green area in the south and livestock potential. Ahead of the route’s completion — which may take some time — Egyptian private sector players are already coordinating on opening livestock farms and slaughterhouses in the country, according to El Wazir.

Dairy and cheese cooperation is also part of the plan, with Egyptian companies using the link as a springboard to start milk processing factories and cheese factories. There’s potential to really add value by using Egyptian expertise to develop the capacity in Chad to turn milk into infant formula. And where there’s cows, there’s leather, which could open cooperation for tanned leather and leather product production.

The Chad-Egypt land route is just part of a larger plan with much more important implications. The most optimistic of which is an African Continental Freetrade Area working towards mirroring the economic weight of the European Union, which necessitates the efficient and freetravel of goods and capital across the continent through roads, railways, and maritime links connecting each country of the continent.

Progress on building physical infrastructure connecting nations has been made — but at a much slower place than planned. Since 1971, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa-initiated Trans-African Highway project has completed about 20% of the planned 57k kilometer road network. The nine highways crisscrossing the continent and connecting Cairo all the way down to Cape Town in the south and Dakar in the west were envisaged as an obvious way to boost trade and alleviate poverty — so the question is, what happened?

At present, it’s said that it’s cheaper and faster to ship a container from Shanghai to Mombasa than it is to move the same container from Mogadishu to Mombasa. Cairo’s relationship with many other African nations is the same, with imports from outside the continent outweighing imports from Africa at quite dramatic ratios.

Just 16 of the 52 African countries source more than 0.5% of their intermediate goods from within Africa. Despite all sitting on the same continent, imports from outside Africa are often cheaper — a fact that the African Union, African Development Bank, and many others are trying to change.

Intra-African trade accounts for around 15-18% of total trade, compared to 68% within Europe, according to the United Nation Conference on Trade and Development. Asia, which has geographic and political complications of its own, sees intra-continental trade account for 59% of total trade.

Looking at Egypt specifically, only 2.2% of our total imports in 2024 were from nations in the African Union, led by copper from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Exports to African Union nations makes up a much larger proportion at 17.2%, but this mostly due to exports to our North African neighbours, with non-Arab African countries accounting for around 3% of total exports.

Much of the problem stems from colonial-era infrastructure works being designed for extraction not integration. Roads and railways ran from the mine to the port, or from the plantation to the sea — they were never designed to link African capitals to one another. And following the end of colonial rule, the ways countries’ economies and urban centres developed geographically was often informed by this existing infrastructure, which happened at varying degrees depending on the country.

Security has been, and continues to drag on interconnectivity projects, with a civil war in Libya until only a few years back preventing any large scale logistics projects in the country. Other countries across the continent have also gone through or are currently experiencing conflict, preventing the building of additional trade networks and haulage companies veering away because of the lack of a properly insured route.

It also all comes at a cost — and the continent is yet to secure the necessary backing. Out of the USD 130-170 bn a year in infrastructure financing the African Development Bank thinks we need to hit its targets for the continent — which faces a roughly USD 96 bn financing gap — logistics infrastructure is a big part. Road, ports, and other logistics infrastructure needs a lower estimate of USD 35 bn and higher estimate of USD 47 bn per year to realize the development bank’s vision for a more interconnected region that will in turn boost the economy.

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