In total, Tanzania wants to build a 2,561 km standard gauge railway network connecting its main Indian Ocean port of Dar es Salaam to eastern and southern Africa\u2019s hinterland.<\/p>\n
The port\u2019s vast hinterland loops in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda.<\/p>\n
In a statement, state-run railway firm, Reli Assets Holding Company Ltd (RAHCO), said it had signed an agreement with a joint venture of Turkish firm Yapi Merkezi and Portugal\u2019s Mota-Engil Engenharia e Constru\u00e7\u00e3o \u00c1frica, S.A.<\/p>\n
The firm said construction of the railway line would start next month and take 30 months to be completed.<\/p>\n
It did not give details on how the infrastructure project would be financed but last July Tanzania said it had secured a $7.6 billion loan from China\u2019s Export-Import Bank (Exim) to build part of the new railway network.<\/p>\n
Tanzanian government officials said 40 foreign companies had initially expressed interest in the project, but only the Turkish-Portuguese consortium submitted a bid and was picked.<\/p>\n
RAHCO said winners of bids for four other tenders for construction of additional standard gauge railway lines covering about 1,000 km would be announced in April.<\/p>\n
Last month Tanzania also asked for a loan from state-owned Export Credit Bank of Turkey (Eximbank) to help finance a 400 km stretch of new railway.<\/p>\n
President John Magufuli made the funding request to visiting Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan during talks in Dar es Salaam.<\/p>\n
In recent years Turkey has sought to deepen trade ties with Africa and moved to expand influence on a continent where China and more traditional donors such as Britain, France and the European Union have a strong presence.<\/p>\n
Tanzanian government sources said Chinese companies would probably be awarded tenders for construction of other sections of the railway line.
\n{{Source:Reuters}}<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tanzania signed a deal worth $1.215 billion with a consortium of Turkish and Portuguese companies on Friday to construct a 300-kilometre railway line, part of plans by the east African country to boost trade with its land-locked neighbours.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[75],"byline":[300],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-36676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-homenews","byline-agencies"],"bylines":[{"id":300,"name":"Agencies","slug":"agencies","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":null}],"contributors":[{"id":300,"name":"Agencies","slug":"agencies","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":null}],"featured_image":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36676\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36676"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=36676"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=36676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}