At the end of April 2025, I flew, on Emirates Airlines, from Lahore, Pakistan to Zanzibar, Tanzania via Dubai. The second block of teaching for the AUL Professional Diploma in Urban Development was scheduled to start the day after I landed. While people often learn about infrastructure by research–reading studies and collecting data–I decided to learn about infrastructure by using it, flying at 30,000 feet, and sipping expensive airport coffee.
The central contention of this article is that Abeid Amani Karume International Airport in Zanzibar is big infrastructure at its best, serving as one example of why and that we should be more optimistic about patterns of infrastructure financing and construction today.
Someone once said that “if you have ten economists in a room they will give you eleven different opinions.” On one matter economists do agree: infrastructure is crucial, especially in developing countries. Roads, railways, airports, ports, housing, and electricity are vital in allowing workers to find jobs, firms to source workers and suppliers, and firms to find markets, whether local or international. For example, China’s rapid economic and urban growth over the past few decades was infrastructure-led. The AUL also likes infrastructure. In a series of blogs and research papers, we have looked at the intimate link between big infrastructure, including roads, railways, walls, skyscrapers, and canals, and urbanization.
While economists are positive about infrastructure, they are often pessimistic about Africa. Concerns that Africa is being held back by an ‘infrastructure deficit’ are ever present in recent World Bank and African Development Bank (AfDB) reports. As an example, the cost of transporting goods is widely held to be the key constraint on Sub-Saharan Africa’s (SSA’s) participation in world trade.
By the 2010s, SSA had only 31 paved road kilometers per 100 square kilometers of land–less than a quarter the road density of other low-income countries. By 2010, congestion meant that 80% of the total shipping transport time associated with Africa-based trade was spent by ships waiting in African ports. The cost of transporting goods in Ethiopia and Nigeria is estimated to be between 3.5 and 5 times higher than in the U.S. The Zanzibar Development Vision 2050 notes that the poor quality of roads has “led to seasonal flooding, traffic congestion, road accidents and high maintenance costs.”
Today there is widespread recognition about the need for better infrastructure in Africa. The African Development Bank (AfDB) estimates that Africa faces an annual infrastructure financing gap of around $100 billion per year. The African Union (AU) vision for 2063, The Africa We Want, aspires to build a Pan-African High Speed Train Network to connect all major African cities, and the 16 landlocked countries in Africa to major seaports and neighboring countries. The Zanzibar Vision 2050 echoes these continent-wide aspirations and promises that “the focus over the next 30 years should be on improving housing supply, road networks, adequate seaport facilities, upgrading the country’s airports and meeting rising energy demand.”
The African vision has been rooted in the practical realities of available funding. The 2005 G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland established the Infrastructure Consortium for Africa (ICA) to support public and private investment in infrastructure. The Africa50 Infrastructure Fund was launched by the AfDB in 2013 to mobilize infrastructure funding. In 2014, the World Bank launched the Global Infrastructure Fund as a platform for identifying, preparing and financing large, complex infrastructure projects.
In 2013, China launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a vast network of road and rail connections, seaports, energy, and manufacturing investment across Eurasia (Asia, Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East) and Africa. The BRI is scheduled to cost between $1 and $8 trillion, depending on the source of estimates. Much of the infrastructure financing is done by Chinese lenders, in particular China Exim Bank. Currently 138 countries have signed up to the BRI, including at least 38 African countries.
Besides the West and China, new donors have also emerged, including Turkey, the UAE, Brazil, and India. India hosted the India-Africa forum in 2011 during which it pledged $300 million to support the construction of railways in Ethiopia. This surge in infrastructure investment is targeted at exactly those sectors which the World Bank and AfDB studies have identified as being key constraints on economic growth. For example, landlocked Ethiopia has built a new Chinese-funded railway line connecting Addis Ababa to the port in Djibouti. The service was opened in 2016 and cut the journey time from 3 days to 12 hours.
How can we not celebrate this infrastructure renaissance?
One reason for potential caution: all this has happened before, and then ended badly. The 1960s and 1970s saw massive, often donor-funded, investment in African infrastructure. The big-push fizzled out, then infrastructure investment declined into the 1980s and 1990s. Even the already-constructed infrastructure was allowed to decay as longer-term maintenance investment was neglected. By the mid-1990s, about one-third of SSA roads built during the 1970s were no longer in use. By 1990, 80% of Zambia’s road system was in poor condition. In Kenya, by the early 1990s, the poor-quality railway line connecting Nairobi to the port in Mombasa raised the production costs incurred by domestic manufacturing firms up to 100%.
Let’s go a bit further back in time to the era of European colonialism in Africa, when there was also a surge in infrastructure building across the continent. In the nineteenth century, the British built the railway line connecting Nairobi to Mombasa, the French the line connecting Brazzaville to Pointe Noire, and the Italians the line connecting Addis Ababa to Djibouti. Why didn’t this historical infrastructure boom generate sustainable economic growth? In 2020 Africa received $40 billion in FDI inflows, with a rising proportion going to infrastructure, especially transport, energy, and telecommunications. What lessons can we learn regarding the contemporary infrastructure boom in SSA?
A good starting point to help us answer these questions is the radical, yet classic book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, published by Guyanese scholar Walter Rodney in 1972. Rodney taught at Dar Es Salaam University in the 1960s and 1970s, and wrote that colonialism was a system of exploitation structured around extracting profits for the colonizing ‘mother’ country. Road and rail infrastructure were built to connect areas of raw material production and mines to ports, not to connect African population centers and expand local market opportunities.
In Ghana, the British built railways that passed through low-populated tropical forests and helped turn them into cocoa plantations exporting to Britain. Infrastructure was about asserting colonial control, not integrating the African continent’s economy or allowing Africa the opportunity to develop trade links outside of Europe. Rodney noted that at independence, a telephone call from Accra to Abidjan had to go via an operators in London and Paris.
Rodney inspires us to ask an important question: is the recent African infrastructure renaissance helping to better integrate the African economy or is it locking Africa more closely into external markets for its raw materials? Scholars have expressed some concerns. The boom in Chinese manufacturing exports over the last few decades has required huge imports of oil, copper, iron ore, aluminium ore, and cobalt (for mobile phones and laptops). The surge in Chinese mineral commodities from $40 billion in 2010 to $375 billion in 2010 was clearly tied to Chinese investment in African infrastructure, much of it targeted to accessing raw materials.
I argue here that this concern is greatly exaggerated. Though China has significantly increased its influence in Africa, it’s (1) not a colonial presence (i.e. not obtaining any sovereign authority), and (2) counterbalanced by the proliferation of investors noted above. Moreover, studies repeatedly show that African governments have significant agency in their engagement with external financiers and infrastructure builders. In the 2010s, Zambia used Chinese investors to promote its priority road building program. In Tanzania, the ruling government has engaged China to advance their proposals to build a mega-port and Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in Bagamoyo. In Ethiopia, the government has leveraged China to build roads, railways, and dams to support their industrialization drive.
There is no doubt that Dubai is a hub; if dictionaries put a picture of Dubai airport next to the definition of ‘hub’ in the dictionary, it would be fully deserved. On the day of my flight, there were non-stop flights from Dubai to 275 destinations in 105 countries. In Zanzibar, the international terminal of Abeid Amani Karume International Airport was built by the Chinese Beijing Construction Engineering Group and inaugurated in 2020. How does it compare to Dubai?
While Zanzibar airport does have a direct connection to Guangzhou, China, this is no replica of colonial era infrastructure. When I travelled to Africa twenty years ago, there were typically direct flights on British Airways from London to Anglophone Africa, but one had to travel via Paris on Air France to access Francophone Africa. Today, Zanzibar airport offers direct connections to Tanzania (seven domestic destinations), to five African countries (South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Egypt), to the Middle East (Oman, Qatar, Dubai, Israel), and to Europe (Turkey, Romania, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland, France, Germany, Netherlands), in all 29 destinations across 18 countries. Zanzibar airport is about integrating the Tanzanian national economy, about integrating the African economy, about supporting the AU 2063 Agenda for the Africa We Want), and about connecting Zanzibar to the rest of the world.
Africa is changing and Abeid Amani Karume International Airport is symbolic of this new Africa. It is big infrastructure at its best, ready to help integrate African markets, not to bind Africa more closely to a single external country.
