Chapter 4 From Priority Projects to Corridor Approaches: African and European Transport Networks in Perspective

Transport is one of the necessary conditions for achieving Africa’s aspirations as they have been set for 2063, but it is not adequate in itself.1 In 2063, Africa will commemorate 100 years since the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) was established: Africa Union <https://au.int/en/agenda2063/aspirations>. It is one of the sectors that has the most investment needs and the highest cost of maintenance.2 V. Foster and C. M. Briceño-Garmendia (eds), Africa’s Infrastructure: A Time for Transformation, The World Bank, 2010, pp. 6–7. It is also one of the key sectors of an economy in which the provision of infrastructure is lower than it is on other continents. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the population lives far from economic markets: on average, it is located 13 per cent further away than populations in other parts of the world. This figure increases to almost 50 per cent when compared to Europe.3 P. Manners and A. Behar, Trade in Sub-Saharan Africa and Opportunities for Low Income Countries, Background Paper for the World Development Report 2009: Reshaping Economic Geography, Washington, D.C., 2009, p. 5 <http://hdl.handle.net/10986/9242>. 16 out of the 54 countries are landlocked, and even some of those with direct access to the sea have vast inland areas located far from the coast, as is the case with DRC. The railway network has hardly expanded at all since colonial times, the lines are unevenly located (they are mostly in Southern Africa) and density is low, ranging from 30 to 50 kilometres per million people, or about 2.5 kilometres per thousand square kilometres.4 African Development Bank, An Integrated Approach to Infrastructure Provision in Africa, Tunis, 2013, pp. 13–14 <https://www.afdb.org/fileadmin/uploads/afdb/Documents/Publications/Economic_Brief_-_An_Integrated_Approach_to_Infrastructure_Provision_in_Africa.pdf>. In Europe, the density of the rail network is between 200 kilometres and 1,000 kilometres per million people, nearly 50 kilometres per thousand square kilometres. Similarly, road density in Africa – 3.4 kilometres per thousand people – is less than half the global average, and this is reduced to one-fifth when comparing its paved roads with those on other continents.5 K. Gwilliam, ‘Africa’s Transport Infrastructure: Mainstreaming Maintenance and Management’, Washington, D.C., 2011, pp. 22–26 <http://hdl.handle.net/10986/2275>. In Europe, according to Eurostat, road density is about 8.1 kilometres per thousand people.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, there is a vicious circle of a lack of competitiveness, poor domestic revenue mobilisation, low investment in transport infrastructure and high transport costs. Transport prices are not the result of a lack of good infrastructure alone, however; they are also related to a chain of defects caused by non-physical barriers along the transport corridors, starting at the ports. Ports are essential elements of the inter-modal connectivity of these corridors, as they are giving access to inland areas and landlocked countries. Africa is highly dependent on ports in order to have access to international trade. While it only contributes to 2.7 per cent of global trade by value, its ports represent 7 per cent of global loaded tonnage and 5 per cent of unloaded tonnage.6 UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development), Review of Maritime Transport, Geneva, 2017 <https://unctad.org/es/node/29022>. In general, however, they do not fulfil their function satisfactorily. Their performance levels are poor, and their infrastructures and services are not up to international standards. The containerisation of African ports remains low, and globally they only receive and dispatch 4 per cent of containers, mainly to import manufactured goods. Only four of the top 100 global container ports are in Africa. The low level of efficiency is also reflected by crane productivity and dwell times: while crane productivity is 25–40 moves per crane per hour on average, in West Africa it is only 20 moves. Cargo dwell time is also high in Sub-Saharan ports: on average, cargo spends more than two weeks at the ports, while on other continents the average period is less than a week.

An increasingly challenging situation for African ports is their interface with inland transport modes (road and rail). Many urban areas around ports are becoming increasingly congested, and goods cannot be easily warehoused or moved out of cities. Dry ports on the outskirts of densely-populated urban areas would be vital to increase the efficiency of the logistics chains. Overall, poor infrastructure in urban nodes (by-passes, public transport, underground railway systems, etc.) is becoming a major obstacle that must be added to the already flawed land transport.

A number of authors have looked at the challenges faced by African transport networks and emphasised the influence history and geography have on them.7 W. Naudé, ‘Geography, Transport and Africa’s Proximity Gap’, Journal of Transport Geography, 17:1, 2009, 1–9; J. Debrie, ‘From Colonization to National Territories in continental West Africa: the Historical Geography of a Transport Infrastructure Network’, Journal of Transport Geography, 18:2, 2010, 292–300; S. Oliete Josa and F. Magrinyà, ‘Patchwork in an Interconnected World: the Challenges of Transport Networks in Sub-Saharan Africa’, Transport Reviews, 38:6, 2018, 710–36. These two factors lie at the origin of the major differences between African and European transport systems. The Sahara desert, the difficult living conditions in the Equatorial forests and a lack of navigable rivers are some of the geographical determinants that are considered to have had a historical impact on the development of transport networks. Low density and sparse urbanisation have also heavily influenced their development. These problems do not exist in Europe. Furthermore, the way the borders of colonial empires were established created terminuses for many roads and railways. The political legacy and poor economic performance of the newly-independent states have also unquestionably made a contribution towards holding back transport in Africa.

With all these substantial differences, does it make any sense to compare transport networks in Africa and Europe? As we will see in the paragraphs that follow, the discourses in Africa are more about connectedness (connexité), where the connections between nodes have not been completed yet (missing links). As Dupuy has defined it,8 G. Dupuy, ‘Propriétés des Réseaux’, Systèmes, Réseaux et Territoires. Principes de Réseautique Territoriale, Paris, 1985, pp. 65–100. the term connexité means the links between subsystems. In Europe, the network is completed in most cases: it is more an issue of connectivity (bottlenecks), understood in the sense of the existence of a multiplicity of links within a connected network.

If one takes the historical context and technological progress into consideration, it would be a mistake to assume that African networks will follow the same path towards attaining full connectedness as Europe’s did. However, as many authors have noted,9 E. J. Taaffe, R. L. Morrill and P. R. Gould, ‘Transport Expansion in Underdeveloped Countries: A Comparative Analysis’, Transport and Development, London, 1973, pp. 32–49; Dupuy, ‘Propriétés des Réseaux’; B. Hoyle and J. Smith, ‘Transport and Development: Conceptual Frameworks’, in B. Hoyle and R. Knowles (eds), Modern Transport Geography (2nd edn), Chichester, 1998, pp. 13–40. there are common specificities and logics of transport networks that correlate with territorial organisation. In this chapter, we argue that despite there being major differences, there are also similarities between African and European transport networks, in particular with regard to recent planning and decision-making processes. Good practices, as well as the errors made, in the European context may help improve policy-making and project implementation in Africa. We will first analyse the differences between transport policies on the two continents and then assess the current infrastructure development programmes in Europe and Africa.

In view of this major difference in terms of drivers of continental integration, it is important to study how it affects transport continental policies in Europe and Africa and if it has practical consequences for the implementation of their respective infrastructure programmes. Three different aspects are considered and compared in the following sections: the key players, the official narratives and the planning tools.

In practice, the African and European institutional architectures are quite different. Europe’s relatively longer experience has helped it reduce complexity and provide more flexible arrangements. These days, the TEN-T is seen more as a policy than an infrastructure programme. The development of the Trans-European corridors is guided by work plans that outline the objectives for action up to 2030. They include investments, preparatory activities, studies and policy-oriented actions. They are updated regularly on the basis of stakeholder consultations1 Generally, stakeholders include member states, infrastructure managers/authorities, regional and territorial representatives, municipalities, metropolitan authorities and transport operators. and new technical studies. For each of the nine corridors and two horizontal priorities, the European Commission appoints ‘European Coordinators’, high-level figures in charge of overseeing, facilitating and reporting on the work plans. One important aspect of their mandate is consultation with corridor forums, which are consultative bodies made up of member states and significant stakeholders. In addition, for more than a decade, TEN-T Days have brought together ministers, members of the European Parliament, the European Coordinators and representatives of the European Investment Bank, the European Commission and TEN-T stakeholders to discuss progress on the implementation of the trans-European transport network.

In support of these work plans, the European Commission has put in place a number of funding instruments that combine grants, loans, guarantees and other innovative financial instruments. In particular, the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF), which is managed by the Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA), co-finances actions submitted by the various stakeholders and selected through competitive calls for proposals. Nevertheless, although several other funding sources exist, such as the European Structural and Investment Funds and the European Fund for Strategic Investment, the largest portion of funding comes from the member states’ national budgets.

In Africa, the current Institutional Architecture for Infrastructure Development in Africa (IAIDA) governing PIDA is the result of a series of attempts to accommodate numerous initiatives that have emerged with the aim of effecting a rapid reduction of the infrastructure deficit. Many of the initiatives in recent decades have been proposed by charismatic African presidents like Mbeki and Zuma in South Africa, Wade in Senegal and Kagame in Rwanda. Once a political action of this kind has been launched, it has been extremely difficult to reach a compromise to avoid adding institutional complexity. When these new structures are created at a national level, new management units are generated that absorb agents and officials. These programmes are difficult to dismantle once they have attained their objective or, as is usually the case, they are not considered to be efficient enough and are superseded by new, and supposedly improved, initiatives. A good example of this phenomenon is the frequent reforms that the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) has undergone since its creation in 2001. It is still hard for an outsider to understand the division of labour between the NEPAD mandate and the AU Commission. The most recent redesign and attempt at rationalisation was the transformation in 2018 of NEPAD’s structures into the African Union Development Agency, which is known by the acronym AUDA-NEPAD. This agency, together with the African Union Commission (AUC), the African Development Bank (AfDB), the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the RECs, is now seen as the lead organisation supporting the member states in their implementation of the PIDA.

At a planning level, the AU has also made efforts to rationalise the myriad consultative entities intended to assist the decision-making process. The most recent unifying strategy was the Agenda 2063, which was launched in 2013, and sets out the AU’s long-term development vision. The PIDA is the continental framework for Africa 2063’s infrastructure development as decided at the Malabo Conference of Ministers for Transport in 2014.

Like TEN-T Days, the PIDA Week has been organised annually since 2015 to co-ordinate and create synergies among the different stakeholders. Although it is not a statutory AU event, it brings the PIDA’s leading implementing organisations together with representatives from, for example, the PIDA Steering Committee, the Council for Infrastructure Development, the Infrastructure Consortium for Africa, the Continental Business Network. Member states also usually attend PIDA Weeks, often in the form of representatives from ministries, the private sector, civil society, bilateral and multilateral development finance institutions, among others.

As mentioned above, European integration was driven by the goal of the single market, and the notion of a trans-continental transport infrastructure was closely connected to it. Likewise, in the case of Africa, the motivation behind the initial TAH network was economic integration and increasing African trade, with one noteworthy difference from Europe: ‘opening up new areas with promising agricultural and mineral potential’.1 Economic Commission for Africa, Resolution Adopted by the Conference of Ministers, 226(l): Trans-African Highway, Tenth Session, Conference of Ministers, Tunis, 8–13 February 1971. In both cases, however, besides the trade angle, other interests and arguments have emerged to drive development of the transport agenda. In the first place, there is the pursuit of political legitimation by regional organisations. In Africa, in the early decades following independence, there was a strong rivalry between the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and UNECA.2 S. Misteli, ‘Gardiner, Robert Kweku’, IO BIO, Biographical Dictionary of Secretaries-General of International Organisations, Bob Reinalda, Kent J. Kille and Jaci Eisenberg (eds) <www.ru.nl/fm/iobio> [Accessed 15 August 2019]. For the latter, the TAH network, and later the UN Transport and Communications Decade in Africa (1978–1988), were initiatives that made it possible for the organisation to bring advisory and co-ordination functions together on issues of major importance for the African states. Later on, as we explained in the previous section, this role was gradually transferred from UNECA to NEPAD and the AUC.

In Europe, like agriculture and the free movement of people, services and capital, the common transport policy was introduced by the Treaty of Rome, which created the European Economic Community in 1957. However, it was not until the Maastricht Treaty was signed in 1993 that the Trans-European Networks were adopted as an integral part of Community policy. This was because for the member states, the TEN-T policy de facto represented a transfer of critical decisions on important aspects of their territorial sovereignty,3 F. Piodi, ‘The Financing of Trans-European Transport Networks’, Directorate General for Research, Working Document Transport Series E-4, Brussels 1997, pp. 24–25. and they only agreed to move forward when the European Court of Justice intervened.4 A. Faludi, ‘Territorial Cohesion Policy and the European Model of Society’, European Planning Studies, 15:4, 2007, pp. 567–583 <DOI: 10.1080/09654310701232079>. As a result, by adding long-term planning responsibilities to the TEN-T, the European Commission gained significant power and visibility vis-à-vis European citizens.

Another narrative besides economic integration is the contribution made by transport networks towards strengthening a shared continental identity. In Europe, this coalesces around the cohesion policy, of which the TEN-T is a central tool for reducing regional disparities. Behind the official rhetoric of ‘harmonious development’5 Article 174 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. promoting balanced and sustainable growth, Europe has faced the need to rally citizens from poorer countries that are suffering from the consequences of liberal policies inherent in the single market.6 D. Peters, ‘Cohesion, Polycentricity, Missing Links and Bottlenecks: Conflicting Spatial Storylines for Pan-European Transport Investments’, European Planning Studies, 11:3, 2003, pp. 317–39. In this sense, cohesion has been presented as an expression of solidarity, as a policy to make Europe’s values a reality. In practical terms, it results in the choice of priority projects based on political commitments and not on cost-effective considerations. In Africa, where insufficient internal trade and low levels of inter-state traffic make it hard to justify the economic feasibility of some of the trans-African highways, recourse to pan-African ideals can easily be discovered behind the official storylines. From an economic point of view, linking all the African capitals by road makes little sense in some cases, in particular where long distances have to be travelled across the Sahara Desert or tropical forests. At the same time, it is a reasonable political aspiration for Africa to think that all its capitals can be joined by road from the neighbouring country. In fact, some prominent African decision-makers, like Adebayo Adedeji, who was UNECA’s Executive Secretary during the UN Decade for Transport and Communications, have openly expressed their scepticism about focusing on trade to boost African integration and have advocated backing it with infrastructure development.7 S. K. B. Asante, African Development: Adebayo Adedeji’s Alternative Strategies, London, 1991, pp. 8–13 and pp. 105–06. As is the case with the European cohesion policy, the goal of opening up landlocked countries and isolated regions is customarily included in official African documents on transport. As a 2011 preparatory study for the PIDA noted, continent-wide ambitions have proved to be hard to achieve: ‘Lack of alignment with national and regional priorities is a primary failure factor, as good ideas become orphan projects. For example, segments of the Trans-African Highways that correspond to the priorities of the country involved have been built, but segments that do not fit country priorities have stagnated.’8 SOFRECO, Study on Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA), Phase I Study Summary. Clichy, 2011.

This brings us back to the economic justification for trans-continental corridors. In the case of Europe, Peters9 Peters, ‘Cohesion, Polycentricity, Missing Links and Bottlenecks’, pp. 317–39. mentions other storylines, such as polycentricity and bottlenecks. Polycentricity is a narrative that proposes competition and complementarity between cities and regions in the context of the common market. This is a controversial line of reasoning because it might be argued that it goes against cohesion policy. While the ‘EU’s cohesion policy aims to strengthen economic and social cohesion by reducing disparities in the level of development between regions’,10 https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/en/policy/what/glossary/c/cohesion-policy. the principle of polycentricity is that cities should be interconnected by high-speed transport, while many rural areas and peripheral regions may be bypassed. In the case of Africa, even though the concept of growth poles is often utilised at the national level, the logic of polycentricity is not on the agenda at a continental level, probably because of the small size of the market. The bottleneck storyline is evoked in the African context, but almost exclusively to describe congestion in ports due to a lack of appropriate infrastructure, and more especially to their management failings. In Europe, by contrast, the concept is far more widespread. It is associated with the insufficient capacity of already existing connections, in particular between or through urban nodes. Again according to Peters, the bottleneck is a concept that is not exempt from controversy. Policy-makers have not defined it accurately, and it raises environmental concerns as to the limits to which infrastructure capacity can be expanded. In addition, it is a notion that is associated with places where infrastructure already exists, and these are normally the wealthier ones.

A very common current argument is built around the notion of ‘missing links’. It was introduced in official documents in both unions dating back to the 1980s, albeit with different implications. In Africa, as we mentioned earlier, it refers mainly to matters of connexité: that is, sections of the trans-African highways that really do not exist, or are surfaced with earth and gravel and need to be upgraded to paved standards. In 2017, according to the AUC’s estimates, TAH missing links covered 4,300 kilometres out of a total of 61,870 kilometres. In Europe, most links already exist in one mode or another, and the objective is to reduce time or increase capacity, in particular on cross-border sections: it is simply a matter of improving connectivity. In both cases, however, behind the rhetoric of ‘missing links’ lies the need to justify significant investments, the economic returns from which are not evident. The choice of these priority projects is often political, as we have seen in the previous paragraphs but, as Peters11 Peters, ‘Cohesion, Polycentricity, Missing Links and Bottlenecks’, pp. 317–39. points out for the case of Europe, the construction industry also lobbies extensively in favour of them. In Africa, while the interests of construction firms carry less weight, the ‘missing links’ attract great interest from the ruling class, not only due to political benefits but also because of the personal gains they can obtain in a corrupt procurement system. For their part, donors and development banks play a central role in promoting the completion of inter-state infrastructure. Firstly, the increase in intra-African trade is a top priority in aid agendas today, even though, in many cases, the transport demand that will be generated will be low in the short and medium term. Secondly, massive public spending on infrastructure is still viewed as a stimulus for the economy. Last, but not least, ‘missing links’ can help maintain lending operations at satisfactory levels because they are usually funded with regional allocations, which are easier to mobilise (they come at the top of countries’ strategies and are not in competition with other national priorities).

In any case, one common occurrence that has a major impact on the materialisation of both the PIDA and the TEN-T is the lack of sufficient public funding to reach the envisaged infrastructure levels. In addition, debt sustainability is a crucial issue, whichever continent is being considered. In the case of European national governments, their contributions to the EU budget, which in turn are invested back through the TEN-T funding instruments, is one way of achieving improved compliance with public debt and deficit requirements,3 M. Turro, Going Trans-European: Planning and Financing Transport Networks for Europe, Oxford, 1999, Pergamon, pp. 102–03. but it is still not enough. This is why there has been a global emergence in recent years of new financial instruments with the purpose of creating leverage of public budgets and acting as a catalyst to attract additional funding from the private sector. For instance, many public–private partnerships (PPP) have been conceived in order to contain public debt: the private operator contracts for a loan, while the public stakeholder pays those costs that cannot be recovered from the users directly. In practice, PPPs create fiscal risk and, in the case of Africa, low technical capacity is a major constraint to developing PPPs in fragility contexts. According to the World Bank, the global transport sector received US$636 billion in public-private investment between 1990 and 2018, and 1,861 projects reached financial closure.4 <https://ppi.worldbank.org/en/snapshots/rankings>. During the same period, Sub-Saharan Africa received only US$23.7 billion across 113 projects. Private financing in Sub-Saharan Africa has mostly been channelled into the ports sector, which has seen over 50 per cent of the investment volume.

We cannot end this section without mentioning two important actors involved in the implementation of the PIDA and the TEN-T: the African Development Bank (AfDB) and the European Investment Bank (EIB). These two banks are respectively viewed as the ‘African’ and ‘European’ banks. AfDB is the lead financial institution for the PIDA and its logo appears next to those of the AU, UNECA and NEPAD in all official PIDA documents. What is more, AfDB defines itself as the ‘Executing Agency’ of the PIDA.5 <https://www.afdb.org/en/topics-and-sectors/initiatives-partnerships/programme-for-infrastructure-development-in-africa-pida> [Accessed May 2022]. In the case of TEN-T’s official documents, EIB is also explicitly, and almost exclusively, identified as the bank providing the loans and guarantees that complement the European budget grants. However, AfDB and EIB are neither AU nor EU institutions. EIB’s shareholders are the 27 member states, and their share of the bank’s capital is based on their economic weight within the EU at the time of their accession. With regard to the AfDB, 41 per cent of the shareholders and five of the top ten countries involved are non-African. In both banks, the governing statutory bodies are accountable to the shareholders, and not directly to the respective unions. This ‘independence’ is an aspect that is worthy of attention. Banks’ strategies are driven by the credit risk of their operations and the need to keep their turnover at certain levels. The choice of projects to be financed is not always aligned with official strategies, does not appropriately respond to economic needs or does not fully integrate country debt sustainability considerations.6 See, for instance, the European Court of Auditors, ‘Report on the European Fund for Strategic Investments’, published in 2019 <https://www.eca.europa.eu/en/Pages/DocItem.aspx?did=49051>. In addition, in contrast to other multilateral development banks, both the EIB and AfDB have the challenge of being dominated by their borrowers in terms of voting share.7 N. Birdsall, The Dilemma of the African Development Bank: Does Governance Matter for the Long-Run Financing of the MDBs?, Working Paper 498, Washington D.C., 2018, pp. 1–5 <https://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/dilemma-afdb-does-governance-matter-long-run-financing-mdbs.pdf>.

However, despite the official rhetoric on corridors, the first PIDA PAP still follows a patchwork approach, mode of transport by mode of transport, and lacks coherence in many cases. For instance, the creation of a tenth TAH is still not reflected in some official documents and, in the PIDA database, many projects are placed under programmes labelled as ‘multimodal transport corridor’, but this denomination does not correspond to a specific TAH, as in the case of the Abidjan–Ouagadougou–Bamako Multimodal Transport Corridor. In fact, considerable doubt arises where in several AU documents there is a differentiation between the TAH and the (new) African Integrated High Speed Railway Network (AIHSRN). In short, while African institutions do not clearly differentiate between the transport corridor and the transport mode, the EU has reached a consensus about the notion of corridor. We should also recall here that in the case of Europe this approach was to a large extent adopted thanks to the reinforced competences that have been transferred to the European Commission, in particular to CINEA.

As a consequence of this diverse interpretation of the notion of the transport corridor in Africa, it is difficult to compare the current TEN-T and PIDA in terms of investment. However, we can compare the 30 priority projects planned for 2020 in Europe with the first PIDA PAP, which was effective until 2020. As we have said, the 30 priority projects have been replaced by a corridor approach since 2013, but they are still a valid point of reference for gaining a greater appreciation of the order of magnitude of the investment in both continents. The 231 PIDA transport projects can be grouped into 24 programmes whose scale is comparable to that of the 30 European priority projects.1 <https://www.au-pida.org/pida-projects/>. There are discrepancies in some official documents. For instance, the PIDA Week 2018 concept note mentions 235 projects grouped under 25 programmes. Taking into consideration the fact that the TEN-T priority projects were conceived to be implemented over 25 years and the PIDA-PAP is an eight-year plan, we can estimate that in Europe, yearly investments have reached about €16 billion, while in Africa the investment is supposed to have been around €10 billion per year (see Table 4.1). The average size of a project/programme is close to €530 million in Europe and €416 million in Africa.

More recently, it has been estimated in Europe that by 2030 the financial investment required for the completion of the TEN-T Core Network Corridor alone is €21 billion a year, or a total of approximately €750 billion of investment over 35 years. In Africa, the AfDB2 African Development Bank, African Economic Outlook 2018, 2018, p. 70 <www.afdb.org/fileadmin/uploads/afdb/Documents/Publications/African_ Economic_Outlook_2018_-_EN.pdf>. estimates that transport infrastructure development requires between €31 billion and €42 billion annually. These amounts include both the PIDA and national needs. If we take into account the fact that yearly disbursements oscillate between €22 billion and €31 billion, the financing gap may be more than €10 billion, depending on the year. However, two important points arise when placing African investment needs and Europe’s requirements for the TEN-T side by side. The former is related to the baseline for the calculation of infrastructure deficit in Africa. While the order of magnitude of financing needs declared in official documents may be comparable, Africa basically has two objectives: interconnecting capitals, ports, border crossings and secondary cities with a good quality road network; and providing all-seasons road access in rural areas. As we have said, the priority is to provide full connectedness or connexité. At the same time, improved connectivity through multimodal systems (for example, high speed railways) is acquiring space on political agendas, which means that the threshold for estimating the infrastructure gap will be raised, and funding needs will increase. Secondly, in Africa, the operation, maintenance and rehabilitation costs of preserving the investments are estimated to be 80 per cent of total investment needs, and only 20 per cent is allocated to upgrading and new construction.3 African Development Bank, African Economic Outlook 2018, p. 70. The problem in Africa is that the notion of connexité is very frequently breached because of a lack of maintenance and road protection. This means that, in addition to missing links, there are links that ‘disappear’ and need to be rebuilt several times. In short, it is very difficult for Africa to begin investing in improved connectivity when basic connexité is not guaranteed.

The TEN-T’s planning and implementation modalities have evolved significantly over time, but the various institutional arrangements have not been exempt from criticism. In particular, national and special interests seem to have prevailed in the selection of a number of projects, a circumstance that has been favoured by deficiencies in the evaluation methods. As we have seen, inadequate cost–benefit analyses or poor environmental impact assessments have contributed to the choice of projects whose added value has been exaggerated. Nevertheless, the corridor approach adopted for the TEN-T in recent years allows for a more coherent and participative framework in which governance involving an important number of stakeholders is clearer, and the territorial impact better delimited.

In Africa, it is difficult to implement a similar corridor approach because of the problems associated with connectedness or connexité. In this case, the narrative of ‘missing links’ is still a valid one, provided that these links connect points with minimum density levels. The impact of a two-lane asphalt road connecting urban centres, which might seem marginal in advanced economies, may have significant structuring effects in developing countries.1 B. Steck, ‘Transport et Développement’, in M. Brocard (ed.), Transports et Territoires. Enjeux et Débats, Paris, 2009, pp. 125–55. At the same time, we have raised the question of whether full connexité must be achieved at all costs, and whether it is more urgent than improving connectivity between nodes where considerable levels of exchange already exist. In this respect, appropriate planning tools, as well as a broadly participatory approach, are needed to guide the decision-making process. Since reinforcement of the networks needs to focus on places where there is a sufficient population and the systems of the cities are structured, the PIDA should prioritise interventions in those territories with the highest density levels, such as the north of Africa, West African countries and the region along the Indian Ocean (see Map 4.4).

Expanding the notion of corridors and moving away from the patchwork method, as has been the case in Europe, would be fundamental for increasing transparency, better defining the scope of decisions and specifying the appropriate level where they should be adopted. A sustainable and harmonious development of African transport networks is exposed to threats similar to those identified in Europe. However, because Africa suffers from meagre public budgets and a maintenance backlog, every effort should be made to avoid the proliferation of ‘white elephants’. In this regard, it is essential that corridor approaches should first target the consolidation of territories with a sufficient network density.

Since the AU does not have funding of its own to develop the network, it lacks the capacity to incentivise better planning instruments. In addition, readily available funds without significant social and environmental safeguards make it particularly difficult for African countries to abstain from accepting offers of aid from certain partners, notably China. These external interests, which are often driven by mining industries, find support among political and financial elites and prevent a thorough analysis to determine whether the overall conditions of a particular deal are favourable for the country.

One asset the AU possesses, which does not exist in Europe, is the existence of RECs, and current PIDA implementation relies heavily on them. The establishment of African transport networks should continue to be supported by this intermediate level. At the same time, the AU should rationalise its project preparation facilities and keep the focus on building the capacity of its member states to plan and implement infrastructure projects. The second PIDA PAP will present a good opportunity for addressing these issues.