Uganda’s government said on Thursday that it plans to advertise a public-private partnership (PPP) tender next year, worth up to $1 billion, for a new road linking its capital to Jinja, an industrial hub in its east, the road PPP will be Uganda’s first in the road sector.

The East African country’s government adopted PPP in 2010 to help fund the prospective oil producer’s dilapidated infrastructure, crucial for ramping up flows of foreign investment. Reuters quotes Dan Alinange, spokesperson for the Uganda National Roads Authority (UNRA), saying that the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) has been hired as the road project’s transaction advisor to help with the tender.

The six-lane, 77-km road is expected to be Uganda’s second toll road after China EximBank’s partly-funded  under-construction 51-km airport express way linking Kampala to Entebbe, the location of the country’s sole international airport.Alinange said the PPP project will help vastly speed up the flow of cargo and other motor traffic on the Ugandan section of the so-called Northern Corridor — east Africa’s primary trade route for shipping both imports and exports, Reuters reports. “We want to reduce congestion on this corridor … for Uganda as a country that corridor is a lifeline,” Alinange is quoted as saying.

The Northern Corridor is the highway stretching from Kenya’s Mombasa seaport through Uganda and branching out to Rwanda, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and South Sudan.

African countries are turning to PPP to fund infrastructure projects described as appetizing to investors and Uganda, expected to begin pumping crude  from its Albertine rift basin oil fields in 2017 is in search of economically viable means of funding its projects, of which PPP is one.

East Africa’s biggest economy Kenya is also mooting the idea of PPPs to build new roads and infrastructure projects.

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