Posted by Transport is one of the biggest headaches for any business operating in Africa. Moving goods has long been estimated to cost 60 to 70% more than in the US or Europe, and landlocked countries such as Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi pay the most, because almost everything they import or export has to cross Kenya or Tanzania first. A truck from Mombasa takes around 80 hours to reach the Ugandan border at Malaba, and more than 100 hours to reach Kampala.
If you are planning how to get your products to customers, these are the issues I would look at first.
Know the road network
Road networks vary enormously across the continent. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country the size of Western Europe, has only a few thousand kilometres of paved road. Algeria, of similar size, has more than 70,000 km. Before designing anything, you need a good picture of the roads you will actually use, the main trade corridors, and which routes are reliable all year.
That last point matters for network design. In many countries, towns and villages are cut off for weeks during the rainy season. On a network design project in Tanzania, the lack of all-season roads gave our network design software real trouble, because the standard models assume a road that is there in March is still there in May.
Rail is coming back, slowly
Rail should be the cheap way to move bulk freight, but for decades it was neglected, and UNECA found rail freight in Africa cost twice as much as in Asia and one and a half times as much as in Latin America.
That is starting to change. Kenya’s standard gauge railway now runs from Mombasa through Nairobi to Naivasha, and in March 2026 construction began on the section from Kisumu to the Ugandan border. Uganda has contracted Turkey’s Yapı Merkezi to build a €2.7 billion line from Malaba to Kampala, and Tanzania’s new line from Dar es Salaam inland is already running. In the south, the Lobito Corridor has cut the trip from the DRC’s copper mines to the Angolan coast to under a week. For most consumer goods companies, though, the truck will remain the main option for years.
Take road safety seriously
Africa has the most dangerous roads in the world. According to the World Health Organization, the region had about 225,000 road deaths in 2021, nearly a fifth of the global total, with only 3% of the world’s vehicles. It is also the only region where road deaths are still rising. Many organisations ban night driving altogether, and it is worth building that into delivery schedules from the start.
Watch fuel prices and fuel smuggling
Fuel prices vary widely between countries, and wherever there is a big gap, fuel gets smuggled. For years, cheap subsidised petrol from Nigeria supplied most of Benin’s market through roadside sellers. When Nigeria scrapped its fuel subsidy in 2023, the price of smuggled fuel in Benin doubled almost overnight, although the trade has carried on at a smaller scale. If you run a fleet in a border region, fuel costs can shift sharply with a policy change in the neighbouring country.
Choosing transporters and agents
If you outsource transport, start by finding out where the third-party logistics companies actually operate. They usually cover the main roads well and offer reasonable rates there. The rougher the road, the more the price rises, because transporters have to cover the extra wear and maintenance on their trucks.
In some markets, local agents find and negotiate with transporters for you. They often get better rates than a multinational would, because they know the market and are not seen as a deep pocket. The hard part is finding agents you can trust.
Share loads where you can
Volumes in African markets tend to be small and customers have little cash, so deliveries are frequent and often less than a full truckload, which is expensive. It is worth looking for others to share loads with. Distributors and wholesalers do this all the time; in markets such as the Trade Fair complex in Lagos, traders combine orders to fill trucks and cut their costs.
Backhauling is another opportunity. A truck that has delivered to a smaller town usually goes home empty, and you can sometimes negotiate a good rate for the return trip. Many transporters still try to charge the full price, though.
A few years ago, I thought digital freight platforms would fix this by matching loads with empty trucks. It has proved harder than expected. Kobo360 in Nigeria, once called Africa’s “Uber for trucks”, raised about US$79 million but halted operations in 2024, and its investors sold their stakes back to the founder. Kenya’s Lori Systems raised a bridge round in 2025 at a fraction of its earlier valuation. The core problem was cash: the platforms had to pay truckers up front while large customers took months to pay them. The idea is still sound, but for now, consolidation and backhaul deals are mostly done the old way, through relationships.
Plan for maintenance
Finally, choose vehicles that can be serviced where you operate. On a project in South Sudan, we found that one make of vehicle in the fleet could not be serviced anywhere in the country. There were no spare parts, so the vehicles had to be driven all the way back to Kenya for maintenance. Finding qualified technicians was just as hard. After years of civil war, there were simply not enough of them in the country.
First published in January 2019. Updated November 2026.
