Useless Ports? In Africa it is the landlocked countries that are enjoying growing economies

A Special Study by Uchumi 360

The International Monetary Fund’s 2026 growth projections for Africa carry a finding whose implications extend well beyond the annual ranking exercise that generates them.

Ethiopia is projected to grow at 9.2 percent. Uganda at 7.5 percent. Rwanda at 7.2 percent. Niger at 6.7 percent. Mali, Chad, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, Botswana, and Zambia all feature among the continent’s strongest growth performers …

… Every one of them is landlocked

The development economics assumption that coastal access is among the greatest structural advantages a growing economy can possess has been accumulating counterexamples for decades.

Africa’s 2026 growth rankings are the most concentrated recent evidence that the assumption, while not entirely wrong, is substantially incomplete.

Having a coastline helps.

It is no longer enough.

And for countries that have coastlines but have treated them as a sufficient condition for economic development rather than a necessary starting point for industrial transformation, the landlocked growth story is not a comfort.

It is a warning.

The geographic advantage that turned out to be conditional

The logic that made coastal access valuable in economic development was real and remains partially valid.

Ports lower the cost of international trade by reducing the overland transport distance that goods must travel before reaching international shipping routes.

Lower transport costs expand the range of products that can be exported competitively and the range of markets that can be supplied at viable price points.

The world’s wealthiest historic cities, from Venice to Amsterdam to Hong Kong, emerged because they controlled maritime routes whose traffic generated the commercial activity and fiscal revenue that funded their development.

In Africa, this logic produced the historical concentration of colonial infrastructure and post-colonial economic activity around coastal cities and their ports.

Dar es Salaam, Mombasa, Lagos, Abidjan, Accra, Durban, and Alexandria are all coastal cities whose economic dominance within their national economies reflects the cumulative investment whose concentration coastal location historically attracted.

But the logic was always conditional rather than absolute.

Ports lower the cost of moving things.

But ports do not determine the value of what is being moved or whether the economy behind the harbor is producing goods and services worth moving at all.

A country that exports raw materials through a world-class port is still exporting the value addition that those raw materials could generate if they were processed domestically.

The port is efficient.

However, the economic model behind it is not.

The countries that converted coastal access into sustained wealth creation did so by building productive capacity behind their ports rather than relying on the ports themselves to generate development.

South Korea’s Busan port did not make South Korea wealthy.

South Korea’s manufacturing export sector made South Korea wealthy, and Busan moved the output.

The same distinction applies to Singapore, whose port is the world’s second busiest but whose wealth comes from the financial services, petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, and advanced manufacturing that Singapore has built over decades to give the port something valuable to move.

Ethiopia: the most consequential counterexample

Ethiopia’s position at 9.2 percent projected GDP growth in 2026 is the most analytically significant data point in the IMF ranking because Ethiopia’s geographic constraint is the most absolute of any fast-growing African economy.

Ethiopia lost direct access to the sea when Eritrea achieved independence in 1993, becoming one of the world’s most populous landlocked countries at approximately 125 million people.

The conventional development economics prognosis for a country of that size, geography, and income level in 1993 was not encouraging.

Landlocked countries face an average of 40 to 60 percent higher transport costs than comparable coastal economies.

Their exporters pay more to move goods to international markets.

Their importers pay more to bring inputs from international suppliers.

The cumulative cost disadvantage compounds across every traded sector simultaneously.

Ethiopia converted that constraint into a development strategy whose specificity and consistency over three decades has produced outcomes that the constraint-focused prognosis did not anticipate.

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam at 5,150 megawatts, completed in 2025 at USD 5 billion, addressed the energy infrastructure whose absence was a primary constraint on industrial investment and whose completion is now generating electricity surplus sold to Kenya, Sudan, and Djibouti, converting a landlocked country into a regional energy exporter.

The Koysha Dam at 2,200 megawatts under construction extends that energy positioning toward the capacity whose scale Uchumi360’s analysis described as making Ethiopia Africa’s largest electricity exporter.

The Hawassa Industrial Park and the broader Ethiopian industrial park programme, which attracted textile and light manufacturing investment from PVH, Arvind, and other major apparel manufacturers at precisely the moment when rising Chinese labor costs were creating manufacturing relocation pressure, converted the low-wage component of the landlocked penalty into a manufacturing cost advantage.

The Telebirr mobile money platform at 52.56 million users and 4.93 trillion ETB in cumulative transactions built the digital financial infrastructure that reduces the domestic transaction cost disadvantage that remote geography creates for commercial activity.

The ICE vehicle import ban and EV adoption programme at nearly 6 percent fleet penetration is converting the import dependence on fossil fuels whose cost is magnified by landlocked geography into domestic energy consumption that GERD’s generation surplus can supply.

Ethiopia’s 9.2 percent projected growth is not geography overcoming policy.

It is policy compensating for geography and in several respects converting geographic constraints into strategic advantages whose exploitation coastal countries with lower policy discipline have not achieved.

Rwanda and Uganda: the regional integration story

Rwanda’s 7.2 percent projected growth and Uganda’s 7.5 percent confirm that Ethiopia’s performance is not a single-country anomaly but a regional pattern whose underlying drivers are reproducible across different political economies and development strategies.

Rwanda’s development model has been documented extensively and its governance quality measured consistently as the highest in the East African Community by Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index at 57 out of 100.

But the governance quality whose measurement external assessments capture is the enabling condition rather than the growth mechanism itself.

What Rwanda has built on that governance foundation is a knowledge and services economy whose export competitiveness does not require a port.

The Kigali International Financial Centre’s positioning as a regional competitor to Mauritius as the preferred booking centre for African investment structures, the Visit Rwanda tourism brand whose international airport connectivity the Financial Year 2026/27 budget’s Rwf 844.2 billion increase specifically supports, and the technology and professional services exports whose growth the governance premium enables are all economic activities whose value does not diminish because Rwanda is 1,500 kilometres from the nearest ocean.

Rwanda understood the specific implication of the knowledge economy for landlocked development before most of its neighbours articulated it: in a world where a significant and growing share of economic value is generated by services, software, financial products, and professional expertise rather than physical commodities, physical location relative to a port matters less than digital connectivity, institutional quality, and the human capital whose accumulation determines productivity.

A software company can export services without a port.

A financial services firm can serve international clients from Kigali as readily as from Mombasa.

A logistics consultancy can coordinate regional supply chains from Kigali’s convention centre as effectively as from Dar es Salaam’s waterfront.

Uganda’s 7.5 percent projected growth reflects a different dimension of the landlocked growth story: the regional integration dynamic whose development within the East African Community is reducing the specific penalty that landlocked geography imposes on goods trade.

Uganda’s access to international markets runs primarily through Kenya’s Port of Mombasa and increasingly through Tanzania’s Port of Dar es Salaam via the SGR Central Corridor whose freight service launched in June 2025.

The East African Community’s common external tariff, the One Stop Border Post programme whose implementation has reduced border crossing times at key transit points, and the Northern Corridor and Central Corridor transport infrastructure whose upgrading has been a sustained regional priority all reduce the effective transport cost penalty that Uganda’s landlocked position would otherwise impose.

Uganda is also executing the most consequential single industrial investment in current East African development: the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline at approximately 75 percent completion, which will convert Uganda’s landlocked oil reserves into exportable crude through Tanzania’s Indian Ocean coast.

When operational, the EACOP will demonstrate at commercial scale that landlocked resource endowments can reach international markets through regional infrastructure partnerships whose development transforms the geography constraint from permanent to manageable.

What the rankings mean for coastal Africa

The rise of landlocked growth leaders should concern coastal African economies not because ports have become irrelevant but because ports alone have never been sufficient and the evidence that policy and productive capacity determine outcomes more than geography is becoming impossible to dismiss.

Several coastal African economies have historically operated on the implicit assumption that maritime access translates into economic advantage without the sustained policy effort and industrial investment that actually produces that translation.

The port exists.

Ships arrive.

Trade happens.

The economic logic should follow.

The IMF’s 2026 rankings suggest the logic does not follow automatically.

Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy by GDP and a major oil exporter with extensive Atlantic coastline, is growing below the pace of landlocked Ethiopia and Uganda despite its coastal position, resource endowment, and market size.

Several West African coastal economies whose port infrastructure has been substantially upgraded with Chinese and development bank financing are growing more slowly than their landlocked neighbours whose smaller ports move less cargo but whose policy frameworks are generating more productive economic activity per unit of geographic advantage.

The specific mechanism through which coastal advantage fails to translate into growth is the same in most cases: a port is a logistics asset that lowers the cost of moving existing production to international markets.

If the production is predominantly raw materials whose value addition has not been captured domestically, the port efficiently exports the development opportunity rather than supporting it.

The container that leaves Dar es Salaam carrying raw cashews rather than processed cashew products, unrefined graphite rather than battery-grade anode material, raw gold rather than refined bullion, is a container moving exports whose value could be several multiples higher if the processing that converts raw material into finished product occurred in Tanzania rather than in the importing economy.

Tanzania’s specific challenge and the question the rankings force

Tanzania’s position in this analysis is both privileged and demanding.

No East African economy combines the geographic and resource endowment that Tanzania possesses: over 1,400 kilometres of Indian Ocean coastline, the Port of Dar es Salaam whose expansion is making it one of East Africa’s most capable container terminals, the Central Corridor SGR whose freight service is changing the logistics economics of the East and Central African interior, natural gas reserves whose Liquefied Natural Gas development is valued at approximately USD 42 billion.

Tanzania is also home to Graphite deposits at Lindi and Mtwara are among the world’s largest, nickel and rare earth mineral resources, gold reserves, a domestic market of 70.04 million people growing to 118 million by 2050, and a regional gateway to 300 million consumers across East and Central Africa.

Ethiopia’s 9.2 percent growth without a coastline is the benchmark that Tanzania’s geographic endowment should be converting into a higher growth rate, not a comparable one.

If Ethiopia can build industrial parks, develop energy surplus, launch a 52-million-user fintech platform, ban ICE vehicle imports, and grow at 9.2 percent from a landlocked position with no natural gas and no Indian Ocean access, the question for Tanzania is not whether it has sufficient geographic advantages.

The question is whether its policy intensity, institutional quality, and industrial investment pace are matching the effort that Ethiopia is making from a position of greater geographic constraint.

TISEZA’s manufacturing investment acceleration at over 900 project approvals in 2025 and one factory per day through 2024 is the most direct available evidence that Tanzania’s industrial policy is producing results.

The Tanzol Solar Manufacturing Complex, the SINOVEST textile factory at Bagamoyo, and the broader manufacturing investment pipeline whose development Uchumi360 has documented confirm that the policy direction is correct and the investment is arriving.

The Fiscal Year 2026/27 budget’s institutional reform programme, whose eight priorities are oriented toward building the state capacity that converts investment commitments into operational industrial assets, is the governance infrastructure whose quality will determine whether Tanzania’s geographic advantages compound into sustained industrial growth or remain underutilized relative to their potential.

The SGR Central Corridor is the infrastructure investment that most directly converts Tanzania’s coastal advantage from a bilateral asset into a regional one.

A landlocked country that can move its exports to Dar es Salaam faster and cheaper than it can move them to Mombasa or Djibouti is a country that Tanzania’s port infrastructure and SGR network can serve.

Every tonne of Congolese copper, Zambian cobalt, Rwandan coffee, and Ugandan oil whose export routing uses the Central Corridor rather than the Northern Corridor generates economic activity, port revenue, logistics employment, and supply chain development in Tanzania rather than in Kenya.

The competition between the two corridors is not primarily geographic. It is about service quality, reliability, cost, and the policy environment that shippers encounter at each point in the supply chain.

Production beats location

The IMF’s 2026 Africa growth rankings are one year’s data rather than a permanent structural verdict. Ethiopia, Uganda, and Rwanda will not always outpace Tanzania, and the specific factors driving their 2026 performance, Ethiopia’s post-GERD energy surplus, Uganda’s pre-oil production investment cycle, Rwanda’s governance dividend, will evolve.

But the pattern they illustrate is not new and is not likely to reverse.

The economies that grow fastest in Africa in the 2020s and 2030s will be those that build the productive capacity, the institutional quality, and the human capital whose combination generates goods and services worth trading at prices the market will pay. Geography will determine the cost of moving those goods and services to markets.

It will not determine whether those goods and services exist.

Tanzania has the geography.

The question its development strategy must answer, in every budget cycle, every TISEZA investment approval, every infrastructure decision, and every education policy, is whether it is building the production, the institutions, and the human capital at the pace that its geographic starting point warrants and that its landlocked neighbours are demonstrating is achievable even without it.

A port is an asset.

It is not a strategy.

And the Africa’s 2026 growth rankings are the proof.

Don’t be fooled by the gloss … The ports are a dross

Uchumi 360