Egypt’s bid to anchor a Cairo to Cape Town African trade highway

In November 2025 Hossam El-Din Mustafa, an Egyptian deputy minister of transport, announced that about 80% of the Cairo to Cape Town Highway had been completed: a transcontinental corridor that after leaving Egypt traverses Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa.

Egypt is primarily funding and completing the sections of the Cairo to Cape Town Highway that lie within its own territory. The corridor itself is a patchwork of national segments across multiple countries under the African Union’s Trans-African Highway (TAH) framework.

Other countries along the route are responsible for financing and constructing their own sections, often with support from multilateral development banks or bilateral partners. Egypt is coordinating and accelerating the corridor but is not reported as fully funding construction outside its borders. The route is not yet fully continuous or operational end-to-end, due to gaps in conflict-affected areas such as Sudan and parts of the Horn of Africa.

At around the same time Egypt also announced a complementary overland initiative linking its territory with Central Africa: a planned 1,720-kilometre highway to Chad via Libya. This project —budgeted at about 24bn Egyptian pounds ($510m) and divided into segments across Egypt, Libya and Chad— aims to create new trade lines into the Sahel and expand opportunities for landlocked Chad to access Mediterranean and Atlantic markets. Egypt funds its domestic segments and supports coordination, while construction in Libya and Chad relies on local budgets and partners.

Together, these corridors sit within the TAH network, a flagship pillar of the AU’s Agenda 2063 development plan, aimed at stitching the continent together through overland connectivity. For Egypt, the strategy is clear: to position itself as Africa’s principal north–south anchor, linking fragmented regional markets and bypassing long-standing political and geographic bottlenecks.

Yet the success of these corridors will depend less on how quickly roads are completed than on what comes next, especially as they traverse some of the most conflict-affected and politically fragmented zones in the world.