{{Uganda is currently hosting an Infrastructure Investment Summit that will be held for two days. }}
The Summit is held amid a sharp rise in infrastructure spending as the East African Community governments seek to tame spiraling business costs and concerns over huge projects that have lagged behind schedule.
President Paul Kagame of Rwanda is expected to attend the summit where he will also hold talks with his Kenyan counterpart Uhuru Kenyatta.
{{The Mega Infrastructure Projects in the region}}
{East Africa has seen a flurry of furious deal-signing of mega-infrastructure projects}
There’s the $25 billion LAPSSET (Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia-Transport Corridor), poised to open up Kenya’s arid and largely forgotten north, tap into oil reserves in northern Kenya and South Sudan, and provide Ethiopia with a second link to the sea (apart from the port of Djibouti).
Tanzania announced an even bigger project — the $32 billion Mwambani Port and Railway Corridor (Mwaporc) in the Tanga region, which will consist of a deep sea port as well as a new standard gauge railway that will link the Uganda and the DR Congo to the Indian Ocean through Tanzania.
In May 2013, Tanzania signed a $11 billion deal with China to set up another port at Bagamoyo, just north of Dar es Salaam. The port at Bagamoyo will have the biggest capacity in the region, able to handle 20 million containers a year, compared with Mombasa’s current 800,000 and Dar es Salaam’s 550,000 containers a year.
{{Ethiopia’s Renaissance Dam}}
The dam on the River Nile, which Addis Ababa projects will cost $4.7 billion, will produce 6,000 Megawatts of power when fully developed, making it the largest hydroelectric power plant in Africa, and the 14th largest in the world.
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