Africa’s railways revival: $90bn Afrail Express, other projects create huge demand for engineering manpower

• Robust higher education response required
• Has lowest engineers per capita – UNESCO
• Nigeria not in Int’l Engineering Alliance

Ben Eguzozie

The scale of railway projects currently taking place in Africa is creating a huge demand for skilled engineering manpower and human resources at all levels of the rail sector across the continent. Sadly, the continent is hard-hit by a lack of quality engineers, according to a new report.

The report says the past decade has witnessed a revival of railways in Africa, as evidenced by several major multi-country projects that are under construction or are at planning stage.

For now, the UNESCO in a 2021 report said Africa, with a population now put at over 1.49 billion (2024), is the continent with the lowest number of engineering professionals per capita.

For example, the Afrail Express project, a high-speed passenger rail system aiming to connect the entire African continent, which is a direct response to African Union’s Agenda 2063, is expected to provide more than 50 million job opportunities. When completed, at an estimated cost of $90 billion, the Afrail Express is expected to be the largest advanced industrial ecosystem development in Africa. But the continent faces a question of availability of engineering capacity and skilled manpower to drive the project?

Construction of the Afrail Express is due to begin this 2024 at multiple sites in different countries. The first phase will connect Cape Town in South Africa to Casablanca in Morocco via Namibia, Angola, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Nigeria and Senegal. The ambitious rail line is expected to start operations in 2033.

Afrail is also known as an integrated high-speed train network that connects all African capitals and commercial centres to facilitate the movement of goods and people, thus reducing transport costs and relieving congestion of current systems.

Though a substantial proportion of these human resources will include craft and trades workers, an equally important component will be university graduates in several fields – especially in civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering. Other graduate engineers will be required in transportation engineering, ICT, logistics, among others.

Other railway projects on the continent include the Lobito Trade Facilitation project, which is nearing completion, comprising 1,300km of railway line connecting Angola, Zambia, and the DRC. A major objective of the project is to transport minerals — especially copper and cobalt — from Zambia and the DRC to the Atlantic port of Lobito in Angola. There have also been important railway developments at national level in recent years, for example the construction of the Lagos-Kano railway in Nigeria, the high-speed rail network in Egypt, the Metro Express light rail transit system in Mauritius, and the new electric train connecting Dar es Salaam and Dodoma in Tanzania. The 1,500km Trans-Kalahari Railway line, which is scheduled to be operational in 2025, will connect the Kgatleng District of Botswana to Walvis Bay in Namibia, passing through its capital, Windhoek. It will facilitate the transportation of coal and copper for export, while establishing an important link connecting the Southern African countries.

Ethiopia and Sudan have agreed to develop a railway line of about 1,500km linking Addis Ababa in Ethiopia to Khartoum in Sudan, extending to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. The Ethiopia-Sudan Railway will cover both freight and passenger traffic, reduce landlocked-Ethiopia’s dependence on the Port of Djibouti, and strengthen economic ties between the two countries. The feasibility study has been completed but the current crisis in Sudan could delay the next phases of design, preparation of engineering plans and securing funding.

As it stands, there is already an acute shortage of quality engineers in Africa, according to a UNESCO report. The UN education and scientific-specific agency, said in its 2021 engineering update that low quality of African engineers was disconcerting. According to UNESCO, only South Africa is a signatory to the International Engineering Alliance for both educational and mobility agreements.

Nigeria, with a surfeit of engineering accreditation bodies — NSE and COREN — is missing from the international engineering agency. The UNESCO report calls for a robust higher education response to the engineering gap.

However, UNESC praised the establishment of railway-focused engineering training institutions such as: Nigeria’s Federal University of Transportation, Daura (FUTD), which covers all aspects of transportation, with a dedicated department of railway engineering and management, South Africa’s Chair in Railway Engineering at the University of Pretoria in 1996, in partnership with Transnet freight rail, Research Chair in engineering at Stellenbosch University, sponsored by the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (PRASA), Rail Academy by Egypt’s transport ministry, the Railways Institute of the University of Gamal Abdel Nasser of Conakry, Guinea (UGANC), and Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa University’s African Railway Education and Research Institute (ARERI) in 2017, designated as an African Railway Centre of Excellence under a World Bank-funded project.