Abidjan-Lagos Highway: Technical work ends 2024

With 75% of technical work on the Abidjan-Lagos Corridor Highway project done, managers of the project say they are confident of completing by close of 2024, to pave way for the next phase.

Come August this year, preliminary engagement with financiers will begin, to prepare the grounds for construction of some aspects of the project to take off.

The preparatory engagement with financial institutions will continue till early 2025 when the experts will hit the market  to talk to investors to attract financing for portions of the project that are public –private partnership viable.

Director of Transport at the ECOWAS Commission and manager of the project, Mr Chris Appiah told this portal design work and other pre-construction work had been meticulously done due to the nature of the project.

“We are completing all the technical studies this year. Our timeline is that by August this year, all these reports will be completed and we will be ready to engage financiers because we will have the elements to sell the highway, together with the spatial development initiatives we are currently doing and share them with investors for them to buy in and come and invest in it.”

According to Mr Appiah, some financial institutions had already expressed a lot of interest in the project and “some even wanted to just come and start, but we needed a proper legal framework and the purchase study to be done so that we move together as a union.”

“They are just waiting for the technical studies to be completed and then you will see sections starting as soon as possible. So for the technical status, I would put it at 75% for all the technical components and this includes the design of the road itself, the trade and transport facilitation framework that will let the road function, the special development initiatives that are supposed to be packaged and implemented as part of the highway. So we are going to have industrial zones, manufacturing hubs, marketing platforms, tourism areas along the highway to make the highway higher.” Mr Appiah explained. 

The Abidjan-Lagos Corridor forms the first phase of the Dakar-Lagos Trans-West African Coastal Corridor (Trans-Africa Highway Number 7), which is planned to link West Africa to Central and Eastern Africa (Dakar-Lagos-Yaounde-Bangui-Kampala-Nairobi to Mombassa.

The Dakar-Abidjan-Lagos Corridor is a key priority project under the trans-African highway of the ECOWAS region, whose development is part of the Program for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA). 

The Abidjan-Lagos section is located on the eastern-west coastal axis of the West African Region and covers five ECOWAS member countries, namely Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria. It covers approximately 1, 080 kilometers and has eight border crossing points (four country-pair land borders).

 The current alignment of the corridor crosses all the major economic centers and capital cities of the five Member Countries from “Place de la République” in Abidjan and ends at Mile 2 (Eric Moore) in Lagos.

According to Mr Appiah, the project design and technical aspects had taken some time to complete because “it’s not a normal road, this is a multinational highway that will not be used by local traffic as they like. “