Tanzania and Burundi have announced a tender for the design and construction of an electrified railway that will connect the neighboring countries and pass through the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
According to the tender document, the governments entered into a bilateral agreement and appointed the Tanzania Railways Corporation (TRC) as the agency responsible for the multinational Tanzania–Burundi–DRC Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) project.
About 282 kilometers of an electrified SGR line will be built from Uvinza, western Tanzania (off the Tabora - Kigoma SGR line), across the international border along the Malagarasi river to Musongati and on to Gitega, which are both in Burundi. The project is expected to be implemented within five years.
The TRC is going to engage a single works contractor and a single supervising consultant for the whole project. It is divided into two lots: the 156km Tanzania section and the 126km Burundi section. The tender document indicated that applications for initial selection should be submitted by 15 May 2023.
It was also noted that the countries applied for financing from the African Development Bank toward the cost of the construction of the Tanzania-Burundi section, which is the first phase of the Tanzania - Burundi - DR Congo SGR project.
Upon completion, the project is expected to become the continent's second cross-border electrified rail after the Addis Ababa - Djibouti Railway, which is the continent's first fully electric multinational railway. It was formally inaugurated for passenger services in 2016, and became officially operational at the beginning of January 2018.
Tanzania has recently increased its efforts to modernize its railway infrastructure, revamping ageing national and regional rail networks in a bid to facilitate cross-border trade within the AfCFTA. In December 2022, the country signed a $2.2Bln deal with China. According to the deal, two Chinese companies will build the final section of the country's SGR line to connect landlocked neighboring nations to Tanzanian ports.
The 506km section goes from Tabora, western Tanzania, to Kigoma on the north-eastern shores of Lake Tanganyika and close to the border with Burundi and the DRC. The section is part of the 2,561km railway network linking the Indian Ocean port of Dar es Salaam to such countries as the DRC, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda. Construction is set to be complete in 2026.