Zimbabwe’s government on Tuesday announced a funding agreement for the upgrade of the Chirundu border with \u200bZambia, to reduce delays on a vital gateway connecting \u200cthe central African copperbelt to southern African ports.<\/p>\n
The deal between Zimbabwe and its private sector partners, the Chirundu Border Consortium, clears \u200bthe path to construction work, the country’s transport \u200band infrastructure development ministry said in a statement on \u2060Tuesday.<\/p>\n
The Chirundu border, inaugurated as Africa’s first one-stop border \u200bpost in 2009, is a key gateway on the \u200bNorth-South Corridor, handling freight between ports in South Africa and Mozambique and the Zambia-DRC Copperbelt.<\/p>\n
Traffic through the crossing includes copper, cobalt, fuel, mining \u200bequipment, reagents, fertilizers and other traded goods, with trucks \u200boften facing bottlenecks and lengthy delays.<\/p>\n
The border modernisation project will overhaul \u200cold \u2060infrastructure, introduce advanced operational and processing systems to reduce delays and congestion at one of Africa’s busiest transit points, the ministry said.<\/p>\n
The ministry did not disclose the final investment \u200bfor the public-private \u200bpartnership project, \u2060but Zimbabwe’s Cabinet has previously said the project would cost $66.8 million and be operated \u200bby private investors for 20 years under a \u200bconcession \u2060agreement.<\/p>\n
Safaga International, which led the $300 million upgrade of Zimbabwe’s Beitbridge border with South Africa, is leading the Chirundu border project. \u2060South \u200bAfrica’s Strategic Partners Group is also \u200ba strategic investor in the project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Zimbabwe’s government on Tuesday announced a funding agreement for the upgrade of the Chirundu border with \u200bZambia, to reduce delays on a vital gateway connecting \u200cthe central African copperbelt to southern African ports. The deal between Zimbabwe and its private sector partners, the Chirundu Border Consortium, clears \u200bthe path to construction work, the country’s transport […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":15686,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":5,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":{"format":"standard","override":[{"template":"1","parallax":"1","fullscreen":"1","layout":"right-sidebar","sidebar":"default-sidebar","second_sidebar":"default-sidebar","sticky_sidebar":"1","share_position":"top","share_float_style":"share-monocrhome","show_featured":"1","show_post_meta":"1","show_post_author_image":"1","show_post_date":"1","post_date_format":"default","post_date_format_custom":"Y\/m\/d","show_post_reading_time":"0","post_reading_time_wpm":"300","post_calculate_word_method":"str_word_count","show_zoom_button":"0","zoom_button_out_step":"2","zoom_button_in_step":"3","show_post_tag":"1","show_comment_section":"1","number_popup_post":"1","show_post_related":"1","show_inline_post_related":"1"}],"image_override":[{"single_post_thumbnail_size":"crop-500","single_post_gallery_size":"crop-500"}],"trending_post_position":"meta","trending_post_label":"Trending","sponsored_post_label":"Sponsored by","disable_ad":"0","source_name":"Reuters","subtitle":""},"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":{"view_counter_number":"0","share_counter_number":"0","like_counter_number":"0","dislike_counter_number":"0"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,2362,30],"tags":[394,76],"class_list":["post-22071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy","category-featured","category-southern-africa","tag-zambia","tag-zimbabwe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22071"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22072,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22071\/revisions\/22072"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}