Dry Ports Development in East Africa - A Benchmarking Approach

Abstract

In the second half of the twenty first century, there was a significant shift in international trade and transportation of international cargo. In particular, there was a sharp rise in international transportation of cargo and people across countries, regions and continents. This was due to advancement in technology, interdependence of economies through economic integration and globalization. The rise in international trade volumes impacted on seaports and their harbors in form of capacity and inefficiency bottlenecks. As a result aIntermodalism with dry ports as a key component have become one way of extending port services inland. This paper therefore tries to give a general understanding of the dry port concept, the logistics situation and the justification for dry ports in the East African region. A benchmarking approach is used where three dry ports were selected from Europe, studied and analyzed with the purpose of extracting lessons that could be borrowed and applied in the less developed world. This paper is not a comparative study but rather aims at using lessons from successful cases in Europe, a logistically developed region to be applied in a less developed East Africa region.