Britain's $1bn Africa transport routes in six former British colonies

Road and rail infrastructure improvements aim to boost trade and counter growing Chinese influence on the African continent

Britain is joining the latest scramble in Africa – to reverse decades of decay and even the disappearance of large parts of road and rail systems – with a $1bn (£690m) project to rebuild the transport network across the south of the continent.

The UK today announced an agreement with eight African countries and the World Bank that will see the reconstruction of 5,280 miles (8,500km) of roads and the rejuvenation of 373 miles of railways, including some new track and the upgrading of border posts.

Britain says the decade-long project will boost trade in the region by hundreds of millions of pounds each year by speeding up transport times, including at border crossings where lorries can wait for days to be allowed through.

The initiative is part of a web of investments and reconstruction plans that have taken hold across Africa in recent years, on a scale unseen since the road and rail networks were first laid down by European colonisers. They include massive Chinese construction programmes that have unnerved western countries, which fear loss of trade and influence on the continent.

The international development minister, Gareth Thomas, today told a business conference that trade routes across central and southern Africa could be "revolutionised" by the UK's north-south corridor initiative to rebuild the transport infrastructure in six former British colonies – Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Malawi, Tanzania and South Africa – as well as two other countries with close trading ties to them, Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Thomas said that the intiative would initially boost regional trade by 10%, and eventually by 50%.

"Africa's share of global trade fell from 6% to 2% between 1960 and 2002, and high transport costs are a major reason for this," said Thomas.

"Farmers and businesses operating in landlocked countries such as Zambia, Malawi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo face transport costs up to 50% higher than coastal countries.

"As a consequence, their trade volume is 60% smaller. Without a better route out, supermarkets and traders are missing out on quality produce and African communities are missing the chance to trade, create more jobs and, in turn, feed themselves and school their children."

A large part of the road and rail infrastructure inherited by newly independent African countries about 50 years ago has fallen into disrepair. In some states, most notably Congo, it has largely disappeared.

Under Mobutu Sese Seko's negligent and plunderous rule, much of the Belgian-built road system was buried under rainforest or destroyed by heavy lorries and lack of maintenance. Travelling just 60 miles drive from the capital, Kinshasa, can take about eight hours.

Congo, a nation nearly 10 times the size of the UK, has just 1,400 miles of paved roads – less than a tenth of what existed at independence and not enough for even a single road from one side of the country to the other.

The decline has been less marked in countries such as Tanzania and Zambia, but over the years lack of maintenance has seen the road system worn away and the railways becoming increasingly decrepit and unreliable. Zambia has 12,500 miles of paved roads but they are riddled with potholes.

Mozambique's infrastructure was wrecked by civil war, sponsored by apartheid South Africa, while the rail network has fared little better. The famed Benguela railway across Angola ground to a halt because of the civil war and foreign invasion, meaning much of it was destroyed.

Britain is expected to put about $100m into the project initially. It will focus on linking inland trade routes with ports in Tanzania, Mozambique and South Africa, where Durban and Port Elizabeth are the principal gateways for many of the goods moved in and out of southern Africa. China has already had a major impact in other African countries, including Mozambique where it has built thousands of miles of new roads. Other recent initiatives have revived part of the region's railway network – one of the first was the route from Durban, across Zimbabwe and into Zambia at Victoria Falls. It ends at the major mining town of Ndola.

It took a lot of money and nearly a decade to make the three rail networks function together, but the end result is that a freight train now takes about three days to run from Ndola to Durban. It used to take more than a month.