The Government has invited bids from private investors to develop and operate a new 95km highway between Kampala Capital City to Jinja to ease congestion on the ageing existing road.
The estimated $1 billion project is part of the Northern Corridor, a crucial East African transport artery that connects Kenya’s coast to a vast hinterland including Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan and eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
In the tender documents published by the Uganda National Roads Authority (UNRA) said the private developer will be “expected to design, build, finance, operate … and transfer the project back to government at the conclusion of the operational period.
In recent years the government has been pumping huge amounts of money into roads, energy and other infrastructure projects to boost the economy.
The country’s first expressway, built at a cost of $500 million, is due to be opened next month between Kampala and Entebbe International Airport.
The 95km toll road, packaged as a public-private partnership, will connect Kampala and Jinja, an industrial town in the country’s east, also famous as the source of River Nile. One section of the motorway will have eight lanes, another six lanes and a third will have four lanes.
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