Friends of the Rail Forum

Uganda this week formally terminated the contract of China Harbour Engineering Company (CHEC) to build the country’s first phase of the standard gauge railway (SGR), a 273-km line from Malaba to Kampala, almost eight years after the project was launched... The development in Kampala comes as Tanzania prepares to launch its inaugural trains on its SGR and Kenya continues to struggle to find funds to connect its line that terminates in Naivasha to the Malaba border to make sense to the Ugandan transporters...

In the East Africa region, Beijing’s scaling back on big-ticket project funding has created the notion that the Chinese are losing to European players such as Turkey’s Yapi Markezi, who are building Tanzania’s SGR, and now, Uganda’s. Sources close to the SGR project in Uganda say that President Museveni’s about-turn from the Chinese to other financiers came in 2021 after it emerged that the country could have mortgaged the Entebbe International Airport over a $200 million loan from China...