Zambia plans new railway to spur trade with Africa’s great lakes

Zambia plans to build a new rail connection to link a Lake Tanganyika harbor to an existing line that runs to neighboring Tanzania, boosting trade with three other nations that share borders with the world’s longest freshwater lake.

The southern African nation’s Transport and Logistics Ministry asked companies to express interest in financing, building and running the concession that will be about 192 kilometers (119 miles) long. The tracks will connect to the Tanzania Zambia Railway, or Tazara, at Nseluka in northern Zambia and run to Mpulungu harbor on Tanganyika, the ministry said in a statement published Thursday in the state-owned Times of Zambia. 

Separately, Tanzania and Zambia plan this year to award a concession to a state-owned Chinese company to revitalize the Tazara concession and operate it on a commercial basis. That 1,860-kilometer line, which China financed and built in the 1970s, connects Zambia’s copper-mining region to the Indian Ocean port of Dar es Salaam. It’s fallen into a state of disrepair and operates at a fraction of its design capacity.