In November 2025 Hossam El-Din Mustafa, an Egyptian deputy minister of transport, announced that about 80% of the Cairo to Cape Town Highway had been completed: a transcontinental corridor that after leaving Egypt traverses Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa.
Egypt is primarily funding and completing the sections of the Cairo to Cape Town Highway that lie within its own territory. The corridor itself is a patchwork of national segments across multiple countries under the African Union’s Trans-African Highway (TAH) framework.
Other countries along the route are responsible for financing and constructing their own sections, often with support from multilateral development banks or bilateral partners. Egypt is coordinating and accelerating the corridor but is not reported as fully funding construction outside its borders. The route is not yet fully continuous or operational end-to-end, due to gaps in conflict-affected areas such as Sudan and parts of the Horn of Africa.
At around the same time Egypt also announced a complementary overland initiative linking its territory with Central Africa: a planned 1,720-kilometre highway to Chad via Libya. This project -budgeted at about 24bn Egyptian pounds ($510m) and divided into segments across Egypt, Libya and Chad- aims to create new trade lines into the Sahel and expand opportunities for landlocked Chad to access Mediterranean and Atlantic markets. Egypt funds its domestic segments and supports coordination, while construction in Libya and Chad relies on local budgets and partners.
Together, these corridors sit within the TAH network, a flagship pillar of the AU’s Agenda 2063 development plan, aimed at stitching the continent together through overland connectivity. For Egypt, the strategy is clear: to position itself as Africa’s principal north-south anchor, linking fragmented regional markets and bypassing long-standing political and geographic bottlenecks.
Yet the success of these corridors will depend less on how quickly roads are completed than on what comes next, especially as they traverse some of the most conflict-affected and politically fragmented zones in the world.
Highway geopolitics
A war-torn Sudan, a fragmented Libya, a volatile Chad, an embattled Ethiopia and a chronically unstable Horn of Africa frame the difficulty of the task. The project is not just about building roads, but attempts to align transport, security and trade across some of Africa’s most fragile political landscapes.
“Sometimes the political ambition can contradict economic logic,” Joseph Sany, former vice president of the Africa Center at the United States Institute of Peace, tells African Business. “Egypt sees peers such as Morocco actively projecting power and influence. In that context, large infrastructure projects become signals of leadership.”
Morocco has invested heavily in Atlantic-facing corridors by commissioning two major deep-water ports – Nador West Med and Dakhla Atlantic- designed to expand industrial zones and serve as gateways for Sahel and West African trade, while Gulf states have expanded control over logistics nodes along the Red Sea and East African coast. By contrast, Egypt’s bet is continental rather than maritime: anchoring inland routes that bypass chokepoints and rival-controlled hubs.
Beyond projecting continental leadership, the corridor push reflects a broader geopolitical recalibration, “especially as its eastern and southern neighbourhoods have become more constrained by the war in Sudan and its rivalry with Ethiopia,” says Youssef Cherif, political analyst and director of the Columbia Center for North and West Africa. The corridor logic, he claims, is also about “diversifying Egypt’s regional options and positioning it as a key gateway between the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and inland Africa”.
Disruptions in the Red Sea, driven by Houthi attacks since late 2023, have also highlighted the vulnerability of maritime routes and the appeal of overland alternatives for Egypt, which in 2024 lost more than 60% of the Suez Canal’s usual earnings due to Red Sea instability.
But both corridors starting from Egypt have their own layer of complexity: they cross conflict regions where construction remains uneven -leaving gaps along the route, especially in Sudan and the Horn of Africa. Experts, though, argue that full completion is not a prerequisite for economic impact.
“We already have complete sections in countries like Egypt, Kenya and South Africa. This isn’t a single, all-or-nothing project -it advances in chunks, and each chunk creates value on its own,” says Sany. “What tends to be overlooked is the impact on rural areas. In many African countries, rural regions are disconnected from main transport arteries, and when these corridors pass through them, they create new rural-urban links.”
The ‘last mile’ of integration
The Cairo to Cape Town route shares similarities with the Dakar-Lagos corridor, a roughly 4,000-kilometre coastal highway that was largely completed in the 2000s and runs across eight West African countries, from Senegal to Nigeria. The West African project has something almost all other trans-African routes lack: a degree of economic integration.
As Alberto Rizzi, policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, explains, “physical completion of a land corridor is just the first step in making it economically viable.” Without regulatory harmonisation or reciprocal recognition of standards, he warns, “hidden protectionism and non-tariff barriers proliferate and prevent liberalisation.” Efficient land corridors, Rizzi adds, also require “adequate transportation and logistics services along the route,” as well as “streamlined customs procedures that avoid long border stops”.
On many north-south highway routes, trucking costs per kilometre remain significantly higher than on com- parable corridors in Asia or Latin America – largely due to poor logistics services, fragmented customs systems and security-related stoppages that create border delays that can add days and weeks to overland shipments. These frictions help explain why intra-African trade still hovers around 15% of total trade, despite formal tariff reductions.
Some regions have made more progress than others. Within the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), many of these enabling conditions are already in place. The bloc operates a common external tariff, guarantees free movement of people and goods and has eliminated customs duties on intra-regional trade, allowing corridors such as Dakar-Lagos to function as integrated economic systems rather than disconnected national segments.
“Replicating the scheme in North Africa has proven extremely difficult,” Rizzi notes, citing persistent political rivalries and diverging economic policy preferences. Regional frameworks such as the Arab Maghreb Union formally exist but remain largely inactive, with intra-Maghreb trade accounting for less than 5% of total trade – one of the lowest regional integration rates globally.
The ecosystem of the corridor
Better road infrastructure can act as a catalyst for integration among African countries that remain weakly connected and structurally disadvantaged within the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) framework.
When the African Union formalised the AfCFTA in 2018 and launched trading in 2021, infrastructure was explicitly identified as a binding constraint. The agreement’s ambition – to liberalise trade in at least 90% of goods and create a continent-wide market of more than 1.4bn people – was premised on parallel investments in transport, logistics and trade facilitation. Through Agenda 2063 and flagship programmes such as the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA), the AU set out a long-term vision in which continental transport corridors would underpin deeper economic integration over the coming decades.
Along with the infrastructure plans and the harmonisation of the whole intra-African trade system, the final key element is developing the economic and entrepreneurial environment around the corridor.
“You need to support the traders, particularly young people and women, entrepreneurs along the corridors,” Joseph Sany argues. “It is important to look at the corridors as an ecosystem.” In practice, this means recognising that corridors must reshape local economies, not just cross-border flows.
Measures of such local development will be the biggest indicator of whether the new corridors are successful, Alberto Rizzi believes: “the establishment of production facilities along the corridor, the development of value chains across the corridor… albeit this would take time.”
The African Union and development partners have begun exploring continent‑wide corridor support platforms designed to integrate transport infrastructure with local production and value‑addition hubs. The Africa Continent‑Wide Socio‑Economic Development Corridors Initiative aims to establish agro‑industrial parks and inclusive economic nodes along major development corridors to link rural production zones with cross‑border markets and supply chains, creating jobs and shared infrastructure benefits for communities along the routes.
In other regions, highway development has already been linked with concrete economic nodes: the Abidjan to Lagos Transnational Motorway, backed by the African Development Bank, has generated interest from private and institutional partners for investment in linked urban economic zones and logistics hubs, illustrating how corridors can anchor broader value chain development and local jobs.
The new Egypt-led corridor’s success will therefore ultimately be measured not by kilometres paved, but by whether it alters what is traded, who trades it, and where value is added along the route.