Ten years after the declaration of the ECOWAS Abidjan-Lagos Highway, the project still stalls, hampering the continent’s process of regional and economic integration.
The highway, which has the potential to increase ECOWAS regional trade by 40 per cent, will also boost tourism, education, health, economic growth, agriculture and improved living standards.
This was disclosed, yesterday, at a four-day ECOWAS Abidjan-Lagos Corridor Highway Validation Workshop by the Acting Director, Directorate of Transport, Department of Infrastructure, Energy and Digitalisation, ECOWAS Commission, Chris Appiah. He stated that the project was at the final stage of technical studies with anticipation that construction would commence towards the end of 2026.
Explaining that the workshop would produce the final approval or corrections and amendments for the consultants to finalise their designs, he added that there had been a series of workshops where engineers from the five countries met periodically to review results from the technical studies.
He stated that from 2025, they would begin a series of financial roundtables and resource mobilisation, which would target the private sector as the major financier alongside the public sector.
“This would be followed by the needed contracting and, hopefully, the first section of the highway construction would begin towards the end of 2026,” he said.
He said the ECOWAS commission signed a contract in 2019 with engineering design consultants to prepare technical designs and financial strategy for the construction of a six-lane highway from Abidjan in Cote d’Ivoire through Accra in Ghana, Lome in Togo, Cotonou in Benin Republic to end at Mile 2, Lagos Nigeria.
While noting that the region had one of the highest transport costs during trade exchange, he said the objective of the highway is to fast-track the process of regional and economic integration through open, affordable and accessible transportation systems.
On whether the construction would take place simultaneously across the five countries, Appiah explained that the heads of state of the various countries gave the project the supranational status, meaning that the highway would be designed, constructed and operated under a single regime of standards and operational system and the management of an authority called the Abidjan-Lagos Corridor Management Authority (ALCOMA), representing the five countries to tender contract concession and construct the highway.
He said that since the project cuts across five countries, some challenges were anticipated concerning different systems, political regimes, design and operational standards.
“These were challenges that were envisioned from the beginning but from our analysis, we were able to turn some to opportunities. In terms of the design standards, before we began, we made sure that the five countries adopted a harmonised set of design standards. For operations, we are putting in place an inter-operable system that makes it possible to buy toll stickers from Lagos for instance and travel along the corridor without having to change currencies.
The first declaration of this project was in 2014, but the successive heads of state have bought into this vision and the project has not suffered any lack of political interest,” Appiah said.
