Infrastructure

AfDB Funds Study for 256km Kisumu-Uganda Expressway

The roads forms part of the Mombasa–Kampala–Kigali expressway.

Updated on

April 26, 2024

Road construction | CK — Ongoing road construction. PHOTO | FILE

The African Development Bank (AfDB) has released a $1.4 million (Sh190 million) grant for a feasibility study on a proposed highway from Kisumu to Kakira in Uganda.

The money, which has been dispensed to the East African Community (EAC), will be used to assess the viability of the 256km four-lane expressway that will run from Kisumu to Kakira, a town in Uganda’s border district of Jinja.

The project involves rehabilitating the existing two-lane single carriageway to bitumen standards, and upgrading it into a two-lane dual carriageway over a 104km stretch.

GOPA Infra Gmbh

After the allocation of funds, the EAC has handed over the site to GOPA Infra Gmbh of Germany, which is conducting the study in partnership with ITEC Limited of Kenya.

The EAC Deputy Secretary General Aguer Ariik Malueth announced during the site handover ceremony in Kisumu that the feasibility study for the project would be completed in 18 months at a cost of $1,499,587.

Mr Ariik highlighted that upgrading the Kisumu-Kisian-Busia/Kakira-Malaba-Busitema-Busia expressway aims to improve transportion services to five EAC partner countries: Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“We expect that Partner States are also in the process of upgrading the other sections of the Nothern Corridor from Mombasa through Nairobi up to Malaba and from Kampala westwards towards Katuna and Mpondwe to achieve a uniform high level of service along the entire corridor,” he said.

Kisumu bypass

The 104km segment will run from Kisian in Kisumu to Busia town. The project will also involve the construction of 11km road between Kisian and Kisumu bypass.

At the same time, another 127km road will be built from Jinja to Malaba. This will be linked to a 20km stretch that will run along the border to Busia town.

The Kisumu-Uganda expressway will be a continuation of the $1.48 billion (Sh185 billion) Kampala-Jinja expressway, which is scheduled for completion by 2025.

The expressway is part of improvements on the Northern Corridor – which provides landlocked East African nations faster access to Mombasa Port.

Mombasa-Kigali expressway

It forms part of the Mombasa-Kigali expressway that was prioritized at the EAC Heads of States Retreat on Infrastructure Development in Feb. 2018 in Kampala.

Construction of the six-lane Mombasa-Kigali expressway, which is inspired by the N1 highway that runs from Cape Town (South Africa) to Harare (Zimbabwe), was scheduled to start in 2016.

That did not happen and the project now remains without a start date.

1,600km-highway

The Kenya National Highways Authority (Kenha), in a charter agreed upon by 13 state agencies, had committed to work with road agencies from Uganda and Rwanda in building the 1,600km-highway within three to 10 years.

As that waits, a private concessionaire is set to be procured for a period of 30 years – including an eight-year construction period – on a design-build-finance-operate-transfer basis under a PPP model for the Kisumu-Uganda expressway.

Motorists will be expected to pay a toll to access the Kampala expressway.