Could Dar es Salaam’s experiment with Africa’s first ‘gold standard’ bus rapid transit system offer an alternative to a future dependent on private cars?
Dusk falls in Dar es Salaam, and for hundreds of thousands of people in this African megacity-to-be the daily chaos and frustration of the journey home begins.
People cram themselves into dalla dalla minibuses, some even climbing through the windows once the entrance is blocked. Others hang out of the doors, but the Kilwa Road heading south towards Mbagala slum is jammed and these diesel-belchers are going nowhere fast.
On Bagamoyo Road to the wealthier areas in the north, solo drivers in blacked-out 4x4s sit stationary too – captive customers for the hawkers who trudge up and down the traffic jams selling charging cables and garish wall clocks, carved wooden animals and plastic skipping ropes. Their metal and glass boxes are expensive and air-conditioned, but they’re still boxes.
So far, so normal for a sprawling megalopolis of 6 million with virtually no public transport and only eight lanes of major road heading to and from the centre.
Dar es Salaam, the de facto capital of Tanzania, is one of the fastest growing cities in Africa. Its population has increased eightfold since 1980 and swells by half a million people every year. The latest UN projections anticipate it will become a megacity within seven years as its population passes 10 million, reaching 13.4 million by 2035. A paper by Daniel Hoornweg for the Global Cities Institute forecasts the city could be home to an incredible 73.7 million people by 2100.
In 2018, four out of five of its people live in single-storey informal settlements on the sprawling fringes, where the journey to and from the centre regularly takes over two hours. It can be longer if rain turns dirt roads to mud.
But Dar es Salaam is pinning its hopes on a solution that could offer a different model for Africa’s megacities, giving them an alternative to a future in thrall to the private car. Unlike many cities on the continent, Dar es Salaam isn’t trying to build a metro. It has chosen a less sexy but cheaper and more achievable route: the bus.
A dalla dalla bus on the flooded Bagamoyo Road.
Even in the middle of the day, traffic frequently grinds to a halt without warning. It is not unusual for cars and minibuses to queue for 20 minutes at a single pinch-point intersection. A lone suburban rail line serves residents in a few areas to the south but is tiny in the context of the wider city. Outside the centre many rely on boda boda motorbike taxis to navigate the narrow side alleys and potholed mud roads that make up much of the metropolis. Their safety record is notorious.
Dar es Salaam’s reliance on four arterial roads – two lanes each way for the most part, one lane in places – is a legacy of the colonial government that planned the city at the start of the 20th century for a population of 35,000. Most of the growth is made up of young people arriving from the countryside to find work, and as the population has exploded Dar es Salaam has grown around those four highways. Nearly all the expansion is happening on the periphery, and nearly all is informal and unplanned.
Until recently, Morogoro Road, the arterial serving the north-west, was one of the most congested and polluted. “It was just dalla dallas,” remembers Ulisses Navarro, a consultant on the city’s original Dart bus rapid transit design in 2005, as we squeeze on to a packed bus for the long trip out towards the edge of the city. “That was the only way for people living out here. It was one of the worst.”
The Dart system boasts bus lanes separated from other traffic, mostly in the middle of the road to reduce stoppages. Ticket payment and control takes place at stations rather than on board, while step-free stations and boarding mean the entire route is accessible to people in wheelchairs or with buggies.
We get on the first bus fine, but for the return journey have to wait for three buses before there is space to board. You should have seen how bad it was before, says Navarro.
The average journey time from the centre to the terminus at Kimara has been slashed from two hours each way to just 45 minutes, according to sustainable transport group the ITDP. That adds up to a saving of around 50 hours a month for the average bus passenger making the full trip. The ITDP awarded the system Africa’s only “gold standard” bus rapid transit (BRT) rating.
“The new buses are much, much better,” says Paulas George, a young IT worker waiting at Manzese station. He takes the bus every day and it has cut his journey time by two-thirds. He says it is not perfect though, complaining drivers sometimes turn off the air conditioning to save fuel.
That is not the only teething problem. A shortage of buses after the main depot flooded during the 2017 rainy season means the system is carrying 200,000 people a day – half the expected capacity. Smartcard readers at station entrances aren’t working either, forcing passengers to buy individual paper tickets for every journey. Each is printed with a scannable QR code, but there are no scanners. Station staff stand by the gates and tear tickets as people enter. Lines are long at peak times.
Morogoro Road was phase I of the BRT project. Phases II and III will install bus lanes along Nyerere Road to the south-west and Kilwa Road to the south. Construction on both routes is due to start imminently. Phase IV, towards Bagamoyo in the north, is in the preliminary design stage.
“Much of the city will have access to a world-class transport system within the space of a few years,” says Chris Kost, the ITDP’s Africa director. All phases are being planned to gold standards and, once complete, a third of city residents will be within a 10-minute walk of the BRT network.
The ITDP bemoans Africa’s obsession with metros. Lagos in Nigeria – the largest city in the world without a functioning mass transit system – has been trying to build a metro since the 1980s. In the latest of many incarnations, the project was supposed to begin operations in 2012 at a cost of $2.4bn (£1.9bn). Six years after the supposed start date, construction is “nowhere near complete”, says Kost.
Abidjan, the economic capital of Ivory Coast, began construction of a metro last year. The French-financed and -built line is projected to carry 500,000 passengers a day at a cost of $1.7bn. Dar es Salaam’s bus system, by contrast, has capacity for 400,000 people and cost less than a 10th of that – about $150m.
Addis Ababa in Ethiopia opened a Chinese-built and -operated light rail line last year at a cost of $475m. Shenzhen Metro Group has a deal to run it for the first five years.
“With a metro, an international firm will often just parachute in its own system,” says Kost. “Bus rapid transit allows existing stakeholders to get involved. That’s what we did in Dar es Salaam and what we’re planning in Nairobi, where the bus bodies will be built in the city and local operators will look after tickets, fare collection and IT. It’s good for the development of the local economy.”
So why are these cities choosing the metro over the bus? Karol Zemek, the editor of Metro Report International, says trains can carry far more passengers than buses, have higher speeds, reduce emissions – and deliver a status boost buses cannot match. “Metro is the top end of mass transit,” he says. “If you want to carry large numbers of people you cannot beat it, and moving large numbers of people around the city is crucial for economic growth.”
Kost, though, sees it more as political expediency. “Because metro systems don’t take up road space and don’t take away from cars then they are politically easier,” he says. “Politicians see it as a big project with no sacrifices. But what if it never gets built? What if what is built is too expensive and so limited in size it leaves the majority of city residents no better off?
“It can be tempting for those in power, but is it really addressing the needs of people of the city? Bus rapid transit has been transformational for Dar es Salaam. For millions of people in African cities, this is their best hope of ever being connected.”
For information as to how Relocation Africa can help you with your Mobility, Immigration, Research, Remuneration, and Expat Tax needs, email marketing@relocationafrica.com, or call us on +27 21 763 4240.
Sources: [1], [2]. Image sources: [1], [2].
Chimamanda Adichie is Leading the Rise of an African Literature Wave in China
Dear Ijeawele is a forthright and frank book, a 15-step letter about how to raise a feminist child. But when it’s published in China around April this year, it will garner its author, the celebrated Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a new status: becoming one of few African writers whose body of work has mostly, if not all, been translated to Chinese.
“By far the hottest African writer among Chinese fans today is Nigeria’s Adichie,” says Bruce Humes, an American linguist and Chinese literary translator. For years now, Humes has compiled a bilingual list of contemporary African fiction published in Chinese since the 1980s, putting together a list of novels, poetry, drama, and short story collections available to readers in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Humes, who has lived and worked across China since the late 70s, has so far identified 146 translated works from 66 African authors.
The list of translations, including the 13 interpreted in 2018, features a great variety in terms of language (French, English, Arabic, Portuguese), nationalities (Egypt, Kenya, South Africa, Angola, Nigeria, and more) and also genres. Yet only a few authors have had more than one volume dubbed into Chinese, and even fewer with two or more books. These include the likes of Nigerian authors Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe, Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, Kenya’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, South Africa’s Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee, and the sole Lusophone writer with at least three novels now in Chinese, Mia Couto of Mozambique.
By having all her three novels (Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, and Americanah), lone short story collection (The Thing Around Your Neck), and two essays (We Should All Be Feminists, and Dear Ijeawele) translated to Chinese, Adichie proves that she’s a literature icon in China, says Diane Pan, who has edited her work at Shanghai 99 since 2013. (Yilin Press published Half of a Yellow Sun in 2010.) By tackling current issues including gender inequality, the immigrants’ experience, and racism, Pan argues the 41-year-old novelist helps readers introspect about life’s major questions.
By tapping into questions about human mobility, aspirations, and personal fulfillment, Adichie she adds, also builds a kind of intimacy between her protagonists and young Chinese readers many of whom are living and studying overseas.
“Her books can help people understand and cope with many disorienting predicaments,” Pan says.
Cultural diplomacy
The rise of Adichie’s translated books dovetails with China’s deepening presence in Africa, and claims it is only interested in doing business and has less concern for the continent’s people or future. Chinese media outlets have also been criticized for their depictions of Africans, and black people have often protested about how they are viewed and spoken of in daily interactions.
In recent years, Beijing has also moved to strengthen its “cultural diplomacy,” sponsoring Mandarin lessons across Africa, increasing its media presence and influence, and backing movies centered in fictitious African states. China’s new Silk Road plan, the multi-billion One Belt One Road initiative, also has a cultural and social component designed to enhance understanding between nations—and hence improve its “soft power” globally.
“Most Chinese readers have the faintest idea about Africa and African literature,” says John Wang, assistant professor at the school of translation studies in Jinan University. Translations, he explains, help “find common ground” and showcase “African literature as an important part of the world of literature.”
In a sign of growing interest in African literature, Humes notes that Chinese publishers now directly translate from Portuguese and Arabic texts, instead of commissioning interpretations from English-language translations. And unlike the past, when state-run imprints focused on ideologically-driven works like those of Léopold Sédar Senghor or Ngũgĩ or favored high-profile and award-winning writers like Gordimer, the profit motive has come to the fore in recent years.
Chinese readers, he said, are also interested in literary writers with African roots who have made a success in the West, including Adichie herself and Congolese novelist Alain Mabanckou.
Pan says they will publish between 8,000 and 10,000 copies of Dear Ijeawele for the first print, with Shanghai 99 selling more than 100,000 copies of her previous works. Humes notes that if a scribe has three or more books translated, “we can assume his or her works are selling fairly well.” And in the wake of growing political, economic, and cultural Sino-African exchanges, Humes says more translation projects will come underway.
“As China seeks to project its soft power and make friends, it makes sense that further collaboration will involve other African countries in 2019 and beyond.”
For information as to how Relocation Africa can help you with your Mobility, Immigration, Research, Remuneration, and Expat Tax needs, email marketing@relocationafrica.com, or call us on +27 21 763 4240.
Sources: [1], [2]. Image sources: [1], [2].
Global Tourism Had Its Highest Growth Since 2010 – Driven by Visits to Africa
With over 1.3 billion travelers on the move, the world experienced the highest growth in international tourist arrivals since 2010. Much of the rebound was spurred by gradual economic growth plus a strong demand for outbound travel from all markets across the world.
And as data from the World Tourism Organization now shows, African countries saw the highest growth average compared to any other region in the world. International tourist arrivals in the continent are estimated to have increased by 8.6% compared with a global average of 7%. That translated to almost 63 million visitors who brought in $37 billion to the continent in 2017.
Visitors were especially drawn to North African countries where European holidaymakers are gradually returning after terrorist attacks took a heavy toll on the tourism sector. This was especially true of Tunisia, which experienced a 23% growth to attract more than 7 million tourists, while Morocco attracted 1 million more visitors in 2017 compared with 2016.
In sub-Saharan Africa, South Africa led with over 10 million arrivals along with Zimbabwe (2.4 million) and Côte d’Ivoire (1.5 million). Arrivals in Kenya also jumped: visitors to the east African nation grew to over 2 million in 2018 from 1.4 million in 2017, according to recent government statistics. WTO noted that island destinations like Seychelles and Cape Verde both reported double-digit growth in arrivals because of increased air connectivity.
The growth in tourism to Africa comes at a pivotal time when the continent is taking major steps to improve travel and connectivity. Last year, the African Union launched a single air market initiative and urged more countries to ease visa regulations to improve cross-border travel. Noticing the growing Chinese tourists to the continent, companies and governments are also scrapping visa restrictions and launching products to boost visitors.
Global hotel chains are also taking note, building more quality hotels targeting both business travelers and vacationers. And for tourists interested in going the offbeat route, Airbnb and curated city guides are offering diverse alternatives.
Yet, despite this progress Africa’s tourism industry still has a way to go to match much bigger tourism markets like Europe. African countries received only 5% of the global share of travelers in 2017 and only racked up 3% of the total tourism receipts.
For information as to how Relocation Africa can help you with your Mobility, Immigration, Research, Remuneration, and Expat Tax needs, email marketing@relocationafrica.com, or call us on +27 21 763 4240.
Sources: [1], [2]. Image sources: [1], [2].
How an Emerging African Megacity Cut Commutes by Two Hours a Day
Could Dar es Salaam’s experiment with Africa’s first ‘gold standard’ bus rapid transit system offer an alternative to a future dependent on private cars?
Dusk falls in Dar es Salaam, and for hundreds of thousands of people in this African megacity-to-be the daily chaos and frustration of the journey home begins.
People cram themselves into dalla dalla minibuses, some even climbing through the windows once the entrance is blocked. Others hang out of the doors, but the Kilwa Road heading south towards Mbagala slum is jammed and these diesel-belchers are going nowhere fast.
On Bagamoyo Road to the wealthier areas in the north, solo drivers in blacked-out 4x4s sit stationary too – captive customers for the hawkers who trudge up and down the traffic jams selling charging cables and garish wall clocks, carved wooden animals and plastic skipping ropes. Their metal and glass boxes are expensive and air-conditioned, but they’re still boxes.
So far, so normal for a sprawling megalopolis of 6 million with virtually no public transport and only eight lanes of major road heading to and from the centre.
Dar es Salaam, the de facto capital of Tanzania, is one of the fastest growing cities in Africa. Its population has increased eightfold since 1980 and swells by half a million people every year. The latest UN projections anticipate it will become a megacity within seven years as its population passes 10 million, reaching 13.4 million by 2035. A paper by Daniel Hoornweg for the Global Cities Institute forecasts the city could be home to an incredible 73.7 million people by 2100.
In 2018, four out of five of its people live in single-storey informal settlements on the sprawling fringes, where the journey to and from the centre regularly takes over two hours. It can be longer if rain turns dirt roads to mud.
But Dar es Salaam is pinning its hopes on a solution that could offer a different model for Africa’s megacities, giving them an alternative to a future in thrall to the private car. Unlike many cities on the continent, Dar es Salaam isn’t trying to build a metro. It has chosen a less sexy but cheaper and more achievable route: the bus.
A dalla dalla bus on the flooded Bagamoyo Road.
Even in the middle of the day, traffic frequently grinds to a halt without warning. It is not unusual for cars and minibuses to queue for 20 minutes at a single pinch-point intersection. A lone suburban rail line serves residents in a few areas to the south but is tiny in the context of the wider city. Outside the centre many rely on boda boda motorbike taxis to navigate the narrow side alleys and potholed mud roads that make up much of the metropolis. Their safety record is notorious.
Dar es Salaam’s reliance on four arterial roads – two lanes each way for the most part, one lane in places – is a legacy of the colonial government that planned the city at the start of the 20th century for a population of 35,000. Most of the growth is made up of young people arriving from the countryside to find work, and as the population has exploded Dar es Salaam has grown around those four highways. Nearly all the expansion is happening on the periphery, and nearly all is informal and unplanned.
Until recently, Morogoro Road, the arterial serving the north-west, was one of the most congested and polluted. “It was just dalla dallas,” remembers Ulisses Navarro, a consultant on the city’s original Dart bus rapid transit design in 2005, as we squeeze on to a packed bus for the long trip out towards the edge of the city. “That was the only way for people living out here. It was one of the worst.”
The Dart system boasts bus lanes separated from other traffic, mostly in the middle of the road to reduce stoppages. Ticket payment and control takes place at stations rather than on board, while step-free stations and boarding mean the entire route is accessible to people in wheelchairs or with buggies.
We get on the first bus fine, but for the return journey have to wait for three buses before there is space to board. You should have seen how bad it was before, says Navarro.
The average journey time from the centre to the terminus at Kimara has been slashed from two hours each way to just 45 minutes, according to sustainable transport group the ITDP. That adds up to a saving of around 50 hours a month for the average bus passenger making the full trip. The ITDP awarded the system Africa’s only “gold standard” bus rapid transit (BRT) rating.
“The new buses are much, much better,” says Paulas George, a young IT worker waiting at Manzese station. He takes the bus every day and it has cut his journey time by two-thirds. He says it is not perfect though, complaining drivers sometimes turn off the air conditioning to save fuel.
That is not the only teething problem. A shortage of buses after the main depot flooded during the 2017 rainy season means the system is carrying 200,000 people a day – half the expected capacity. Smartcard readers at station entrances aren’t working either, forcing passengers to buy individual paper tickets for every journey. Each is printed with a scannable QR code, but there are no scanners. Station staff stand by the gates and tear tickets as people enter. Lines are long at peak times.
Morogoro Road was phase I of the BRT project. Phases II and III will install bus lanes along Nyerere Road to the south-west and Kilwa Road to the south. Construction on both routes is due to start imminently. Phase IV, towards Bagamoyo in the north, is in the preliminary design stage.
“Much of the city will have access to a world-class transport system within the space of a few years,” says Chris Kost, the ITDP’s Africa director. All phases are being planned to gold standards and, once complete, a third of city residents will be within a 10-minute walk of the BRT network.
The ITDP bemoans Africa’s obsession with metros. Lagos in Nigeria – the largest city in the world without a functioning mass transit system – has been trying to build a metro since the 1980s. In the latest of many incarnations, the project was supposed to begin operations in 2012 at a cost of $2.4bn (£1.9bn). Six years after the supposed start date, construction is “nowhere near complete”, says Kost.
Abidjan, the economic capital of Ivory Coast, began construction of a metro last year. The French-financed and -built line is projected to carry 500,000 passengers a day at a cost of $1.7bn. Dar es Salaam’s bus system, by contrast, has capacity for 400,000 people and cost less than a 10th of that – about $150m.
Addis Ababa in Ethiopia opened a Chinese-built and -operated light rail line last year at a cost of $475m. Shenzhen Metro Group has a deal to run it for the first five years.
“With a metro, an international firm will often just parachute in its own system,” says Kost. “Bus rapid transit allows existing stakeholders to get involved. That’s what we did in Dar es Salaam and what we’re planning in Nairobi, where the bus bodies will be built in the city and local operators will look after tickets, fare collection and IT. It’s good for the development of the local economy.”
So why are these cities choosing the metro over the bus? Karol Zemek, the editor of Metro Report International, says trains can carry far more passengers than buses, have higher speeds, reduce emissions – and deliver a status boost buses cannot match. “Metro is the top end of mass transit,” he says. “If you want to carry large numbers of people you cannot beat it, and moving large numbers of people around the city is crucial for economic growth.”
Kost, though, sees it more as political expediency. “Because metro systems don’t take up road space and don’t take away from cars then they are politically easier,” he says. “Politicians see it as a big project with no sacrifices. But what if it never gets built? What if what is built is too expensive and so limited in size it leaves the majority of city residents no better off?
“It can be tempting for those in power, but is it really addressing the needs of people of the city? Bus rapid transit has been transformational for Dar es Salaam. For millions of people in African cities, this is their best hope of ever being connected.”
For information as to how Relocation Africa can help you with your Mobility, Immigration, Research, Remuneration, and Expat Tax needs, email marketing@relocationafrica.com, or call us on +27 21 763 4240.
Sources: [1], [2]. Image sources: [1], [2].
Kenya’s Tourism Earnings Up 31%
Kenya’s 2018 tourist arrivals grew by 37.33 percent from the previous year to cross the two million mark for the first time, posting a significant growth in earnings to Sh157 billion.
The earnings are an 31.2 percent improvement from the Sh119 billion earned in 2017, according to Tourism Cabinet Secretary Najib Balala.
The latest statistics show there were 2,025,206 tourists arriving compared with 1,474,671 international arrivals in the previous year.
The United States remained Kenya’s leading market, growing by 11.12 per cent with 225,157 arrivals.
“The gains of the sector were as a result of coordinated efforts between various arms of government, whom the tourism sector has engaged, as well as the concerted efforts in marketing Kenya as a destination of choice,” Mr Balala said, while releasing the tourism data at State House, Mombasa.
Tanzania was second with a 10.48 per cent share of the arrivals at 212,216 tourists. Uganda was third with a share of 10.08 per cent at 204,082 arrivals.
Other top markets were India, China, Germany, Italy and South Africa.
Mr Balala said a total of 3.9 million bed nights were taken up by Kenyans last year compared with 3.6 million in 2017.
“Domestic bed night for the year 2018 were estimated at 3,974,243, a 9.03 per cent increase compared to 2017 data of 3, 645, 243,” he said.
Refurbish products
While receiving the tourism performance report, President Uhuru Kenyatta encouraged private sector players to invest more in refurbishing their products and revamping tourism experiences.
“As part of enhancing repeat visits, as well as recommend the destination to other visitors. Kenya currently has a total of 68 global hotel brands, a clear indication that the international community is confident of returns in investment in the tourism sector,” said the President.
The president expressed his satisfaction on the overall achievement of the country’s foreign exchange earner saying it is a key sector that contributes substantively to the economy.
Mr Kenyatta also urged county governments to prioritise packaging of tourism products by partnering with government expert to boost the sector.
“Counties are key players and hosts of many tourism experiences, they should partner with government expert agencies, like the Kenya Tourism Board and collaborate with neighbouring devolved units to enrich the existing tourism circuits,” he added.
The president said the Sh460 Mama Ngina Waterfront is a key project that will be part of enhancing the coastal tourism experience.
The recreational facility is being upgraded and given a facelift to attain international standards.
Mr Balala attributed the gains made by the sector to coordinated efforts between various arms of government, marketing of Kenya as a destination of choice among other strategies.
“We engaged various government departments, concerted efforts in marketing Kenya as a destination of choice. Investment of the recovery funding has also helped in growing the sector,” he elaborated.
North Africa’s decline
Mr Balala said Kenya also benefitted from the North Africa decline of tourism.
“The Arab Spring has affected them badly as well as areas like India and Thailand which have their own issues.
“Both Florida and Caribbean areas with the weather patterns changing, it has affected and people are now moving to Africa,” he elaborated on Sunday during a press conference at English Point Marina in Mombasa.
For information as to how Relocation Africa can help you with your Mobility, Immigration, Research, Remuneration, and Expat Tax needs, email marketing@relocationafrica.com, or call us on +27 21 763 4240.
Sources: [1], [2]. Image sources: Sergey Pesterev [1], [2].