Kenya, Uganda Push Railway Link as Great Lakes Trade Potential Drives Corridor Build-Out

The case for the Kenya-Uganda railway is stronger than the politics around its launch. East and Central Africa now sit on a market large enough, young enough, and resource-rich enough to force a new round of infrastructure building. The real question is whether the region can match new track with border reform, power, security, and industrial policy, or whether it will simply move the same old bottlenecks onto newer rails. Kenya’s decision to restart the Naivasha-Kisumu-Malaba extension and Uganda’s parallel rail moves point to a wider shift in how the Great Lakes are being positioned. Kenya has revived its line after a six-year halt, using a revenue-backed model tied to its railway levy. Uganda, meanwhile, has signed with Turkey’s Yapi Merkezi to build the Malaba-Kampala section and is also exploring a southern link into Tanzania’s network and the Port of Dar es Salaam. That is not just project activity. It is a sign that the region’s biggest landlocked economy wants more than one route to the sea, and that corridor strategy in East Africa is becoming more competitive and more commercial.  The economic logic is hard to ignore. The East African Community said its population reached about 350 million in 2025, with 77.5% under 35 and 53.1% in the working-age bracket. The bloc’s total merchandise trade reached $156.6 billion in 2025, with exports rising to $77.0 billion, imports to $79.6 billion, intra-EAC trade to $19.3 billion, and trade with African partners to $39 billion. Those are not the numbers of a frontier market waiting for relevance. They are the numbers of a regional economy already outgrowing the transport systems meant to serve it.  Nor is this only a consumer story. The EAC’s own trade data show exports are increasingly shaped by mineral commodities, with copper accounting for 39.2% of total exports in 2025 and precious metals and stones 19.5%, while coffee, tea, and spices remain important earners. Beyond the bloc, the Democratic Republic of Congo still accounted for an estimated 76% of world cobalt mine production in 2024, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Uganda’s gold exports, meanwhile, jumped 75.8% in 2025 to $5.8 billion, overtaking coffee and reinforcing the country’s role as a regional processing and trading hub. In that context, the rail push is not speculative. It is an attempt to align infrastructure with a trade geography already being pulled by minerals, food, fuel, and intermediate goods.  That geography is now clearly two-coasted. The Port of Mombasa handled a record 45.45 million metric tons in 2025, confirming its central role in serving Uganda and the wider hinterland. But Tanzania is no longer offering a theoretical alternative. It launched a 541-km electric standard gauge line between Dar es Salaam and Dodoma in 2024 as the first operational section of a planned 2,561-km network extending toward Mwanza and Kigoma, with the wider aim of linking more deeply into Burundi and the DRC. Uganda’s proposed southern connection to Tanzania is explicitly designed to move minerals such as gold, copper, and iron ore more cheaply through Dar es Salaam. The implication is plain enough: the Great Lakes is moving from dependence on a single dominant gateway toward a contest between corridors.  Still, steel alone will not lower the region’s logistics bill. The World Bank has warned that transport costs along East African corridors remain among the highest in the world because of weak documentation, long border delays, proliferating checkpoints, and underdeveloped transit systems. That matters even more in the Great Lakes, where a large share of commerce is not containerised corporate freight but small-scale border trade. World Bank research on trade between the DRC and its neighbours found that much of it is informal and carried by individual traders, most of them poor women. In other words, the region’s commercial reality extends well beyond ports and mainlines. Unless customs reform, lake ports, feeder roads, warehousing and small-trader conditions improve alongside rail, the region may end up with faster trains feeding old inefficiencies.  There is also the security question, which too many corridor debates treat as background noise. It is not. Reuters reported in March that M23, which staged a lightning advance in eastern Congo in January 2025, still holds large swathes of territory. A month earlier, Reuters also reported intensified fighting in South Kivu around Minembwe. For freight operators, insurers, miners, and traders, instability in eastern Congo is not a diplomatic footnote. It affects route reliability, cargo insurance, mineral traceability, and the commercial confidence needed for long-horizon infrastructure investment. A corridor that runs into insecurity is not a corridor in the full economic sense. It is a partial route with a political discount built into it.  Then there is power. The region cannot talk seriously about turning corridors into industrial platforms while treating electricity as a separate conversation. A World Bank-backed project under the Eastern Africa Power Pool is explicitly aimed at building a more robust regional electricity market through cross-border trade, improved system operations, and better use of renewable resources. That is not a side project. It goes to the heart of whether corridor states remain transit economies or become places where minerals are refined, food is processed, and light industry can scale. Rail can move ore and containers, but it is the power that determines whether the value added happens before export or after it.  Urbanisation is tightening the case further. OECD projections show East Africa’s urban population rising to 355 million, while Central Africa is expected to record the fastest urban population growth. That means more consumers, more factories, more construction demand, more food logistics, and more pressure on existing transport links. It also means the Great Lakes can no longer be understood simply as a remote hinterland feeding distant ports. It is becoming a denser commercial zone in its own right. That is why the Kenya-Uganda railway matters, but also why it cannot be judged in isolation. The line is part of a larger reordering in which Mombasa, Dar es Salaam, and the inland resource belt are being drawn into a more tightly contested market. The winners will not be the countries that lay the most track. They will be the ones that connect transport, power, trade facilitation, and security into a workable economic system.  In that sense, the Kenya-Uganda rail push is not really about rail. It is about whether East and Central Africa are finally ready to build for the scale of market they already have. The demand is there. The resources are there. The ports are expanding. The demography is on the region’s side. What has been missing is the connective discipline to turn those advantages into a lower-cost, higher-volume, and more industrialised trade economy. That is the real test now.