Redundancies of African port hinterlands and their implications for new container port investments

Abstract

Improving connectivity between ports and the hinterlands they serve is critical for reliable and cost-efficient freight transport. However, overreliance on a single port, or small subset of ports, can cause economic losses when those ports fail, given limited redundancies of port-hinterland systems. However, planners often lack critical insights into port-hinterland redundancy. Here, we analyse the port-hinterland redundancies across Africa, a continent with a small number of gateway ports serving large hinterlands and large investment need in the coming decades, providing a window of opportunity to embed redundancy in strategic transport investments. We find that regions with high accessibility, in particular coastal cities close to a major seaport (e.g., Namibia, Senegal, Kenya) have low redundancy. In contrast, some landlocked hinterlands (e.g., Zambia, Zimbabwe, Niger, and Chad) have low accessibility, yet high redundancies given their reliance on different port ranges. We further show that new transport investments aimed at improving accessibility can create both synergies and trade-offs with system redundancy. Port terminal expansions, in particular, can reduce the redundancy of the core hinterland while improving the redundancy of the hinterland periphery. Rail connections can improve access to a wider set of ports at a comparable cost but can also reinforce the dependency on a single cost-efficient rail connection. Analysing redundancies of port hinterlands can support strategic planning of regional investments and help improve the resilience of the regional and continental transport system against disruptions.