Kenya and Tanzania are spending billions to position their ports and railways as the default gateways of a trillion-dollar region. The outcome will be decided by Uganda, Rwanda and the DRC, not the coastline.

On a Tuesday morning in early 2026, two announcements landed within minutes of each other. The Kenya Ports Authority reported that Mombasa had handled a record 45.45 million metric tonnes of cargo in 2025, the highest annual throughput on record and a 10 per cent jump on the year before.

A few offices down the East African coast, the Tanzania Ports Authority confirmed that Dar es Salaam had crossed 27.7 million tonnes in its own financial year, a rise of roughly 17 per cent.

For decades, the port story of East Africa was essentially a monologue. Mombasa, modernised under British colonial rule, was the default gateway for landlocked Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan and the eastern DRC.

Today the monologue is becoming a dialogue. Dar es Salaam has spent the last decade quietly assembling the infrastructure, a deep-water container terminal, a one-stop cargo centre, and the first stretches of a new electric Standard Gauge Railway, to contest that role.

According to the World Bank’s 2024 Container Port Performance Index, Mombasa slipped to 375th globally, while Dar es Salaam climbed to 312th the following year.

The Tanzania Ports Authority claimed Dar es Salaam had overtaken every East African peer on service efficiency, jumping 105 places in the index.

The rivalry has gone quiet, but it is not small. It is reshaping cargo movements worth tens of billions of dollars and redrawing the map of how ordinary consumers in Kampala, Kigali, Bujumbura and Lubumbashi pay for their fuel, rice, cement and second-hand clothes.

Two corridors, two anchor ports

To understand the rivalry, you have to follow the road. East African trade moves not through one port but through two competing transport spines.

Each is roughly 1,700 kilometres long, anchored at an Indian Ocean gateway, and threading through one or more landlocked neighbours before reaching the heart of the continent.

The Northern Corridor leaves Mombasa the moment a ship is unloaded, threading north-west to the Uganda border at Malaba, with side branches into South Sudan via Nimule and the eastern DRC.

Rwanda and Burundi are reached through the Mirama Hills and Kobero crossings.

The Central Corridor leaves Dar es Salaam westwards, with its anchor interchange at Isaka feeding onward traffic to Kigali, Bujumbura, the DRC via Rusumo and Manyovu and to Zambia’s Copperbelt via Tunduma.

Its natural hinterland is broader, but its road infrastructure has, until recently, been thinner and slower.

Corridor reach at a glance

Mombasa remains the larger of the two ports by annual tonnage, but Dar es Salaam is closing the gap faster than at any point in modern history.

Mombasa is, however, still the destination of choice for the largest concentration of transit cargo in the region.

In 2024, Mombasa moved 13.4 million tonnes of transit cargo, a 17.4 per cent jump on 2023, of which Uganda alone absorbed 8.8 million tonnes (around 65.7 per cent).

The DRC was the second-largest transit customer, followed by Rwanda, South Sudan and Burundi.

Dar es Salaam’s transit book is structurally different: more of its landlocked cargo is destined for the DRC and Zambia, with Rwanda and Burundi running a tighter race between the two corridors.

“The sharp increase in DRC-bound cargo contrasts with declines recorded in some other markets, highlighting the growing importance of the DRC trade corridor to the performance of the Port of Dar es Salaam,” Abed Gallus, Dar es Salaam Port Director, said.

The Standard Gauge Railway and the new geography of cargo

Both Kenya and Tanzania have spent the last decade betting that a single piece of infrastructure, a Standard Gauge Railway, will decide the next twenty years of inland cargo competition.

Kenya opened the first section of its SGR in 2017, the 472-kilometre Mombasa–Nairobi line, and extended it to Naivasha in 2019.

The line has moved millions of tonnes of cargo off the road and into the dry ports of Athi River and Naivasha, but its westward extension stalled.

In July 2026, ground was broken at Kibos, near Kisumu, on the Naivasha–Kisumu–Malaba SGR — the segment that will, in theory, finish the spine to the Uganda border for the first time.

Tanzania’s SGR is a different story. Built by Turkish and Chinese contractors in phases, the line runs electrified from Dar es Salaam through Morogoro and Dodoma, with construction of the 341-kilometre Mwanza–Isaka leg reportedly about two-thirds complete as of early 2026.

Isaka is the interchange town through which cargo bound for Rwanda, Burundi and the eastern DRC already flows to the Central Corridor, the town on which Tanzania is concentrating its bid to capture Rwandan and DRC traffic.

In April 2026, the Tanzania Railway Corporation confirmed new financing of about US $1.28 billion, backed by Standard Chartered, to accelerate the next phases.

“This gives us confidence in achieving the 1.3 million-tonne target for 2026 and surpassing the 30 million-tonne target for the Port of Dar es Salaam,” DP World’s head of external relations, Elitunu Mallamia, said.

For Rwanda, the calculus is direct. The Central Corridor rail plan offers a single SGR journey from Dar es Salaam to Isaka followed by a short road leg to Kigali, shorter in both distance and total cost than the Mombasa–Malaba–Kampala–Kigali road chain.

Why Mombasa started losing ground

By 2024, waiting times at Mombasa were consistently above 2.7 days; by early 2026, vessel queues were delaying the discharge of fertiliser and clinker ships, while coffee exporters complained of berthing delays of more than a week, putting shelf-cycle shipments at risk.

In late 2024, the Kenya Ports Authority itself acknowledged that Mombasa had lost roughly 17 per cent of its transit cargo share to Dar es Salaam over the previous two years.

“Every delay and inefficiency directly impacts our national revenue and the cost of goods for consumers across the region,” Kenya’s Principal Secretary for EAC Affairs, Caroline Karugu, said at the time.

A wave of public criticism from clearing-and-forwarding agents, importers, and logistics operators who threatened industrial action in November 2025 drove the port management to fast-track digital clearance, evacuate long-dwelling containers, and reroute some cargo through the newer Lamu Port to free up berth space at Kilindini.

Tanzania has moved decisively to monetise the perception that Mombasa is congested.

In 2025, the Tanzania Ports Authority extended free storage at Dar es Salaam to 30 days for transit cargo destined for Uganda and the DRC, with even longer windows for domestic Tanzanian and Kenyan cargo, a direct, targeted counter to the demurrage charges piling up at Mombasa.

Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and the DRC, who actually choose what

Uganda is the anchor customer for both ports, but overwhelmingly for Mombasa.

Roughly four out of every five transit tonnes leaving Mombasa for a landlocked neighbour are headed to Uganda, and the country’s industrial economy in Jinja and Kampala was built around the Northern Corridor.

Uganda’s relationship with Kenya has, nonetheless, cooled in recent years, and a quiet stream of large Ugandan importers has begun testing the Central Corridor route via Isaka.

Tanzanian policymakers describe this as the next big prize.

Rwanda sits on the seam between the two corridors, and is the country most actively arbitrating.

From Kigali, Mombasa via Malaba is around 1,800 kilometres; Dar es Salaam via Isaka is closer to 1,500.

The shorter distance, combined with the new SGR plans, has made Dar es Salaam attractive to Rwandan shippers.

That said, in the final quarter of 2025, Rwandan importers reportedly diverted more than 300 million US dollars worth of cargo back to Mombasa, partly in response to friction along the Central Corridor during Tanzanian elections and partly due to price.

Burundi is small in absolute terms but politically important: it sits firmly in the Central Corridor’s natural hinterland.

The routing of its tea, coffee and mineral exports through Dar es Salaam has effectively given Tanzania a captive share of the country’s trade that Mombasa no longer contests.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is the wild card.

The country’s eastern provinces ship through the Central Corridor, while its Katanga and Kinshasa volumes increasingly flow toward Dar es Salaam as the SGR network in Tanzania and the proposed Kalemie–Ndjili rail link shorten the journey.

With the DRC’s population now approaching 110 million and its urban middle class expanding fast, the choice of port will be one of the decisive factors in East African trade over the next two decades.

Zambia sits in Dar es Salaam’s deepest traditional hinterland, with the Tunduma crossing feeding the Copperbelt; the Malaba–Northern Corridor road route to Lusaka is fundamentally not competitive. Malawi tilts Central too.

Lamu and the slow emergence of a three-port map

The headline rivalry is no longer just Mombasa v Dar es Salaam. A third and fourth port are quietly taking shape.

Kenya’s Lamu began operations in 2021 and is the anchor of the LAPSSET corridor, aimed at the South Sudan and Ethiopian markets.

On the other hand, Tanzania’s Tanga is an older colonial port now being modernised with Japanese support for northern Tanzania and parts of Uganda.

Lamu’s economics are still a question mark.

Conceived as the sea-end of a 2,900-kilometre LAPSSET corridor stretching to Addis Ababa and Juba, the port’s construction has been slow, costs have escalated, and two of the originally planned 32 berths have so far been completed.

Tanga, just north of Dar es Salaam, is being repositioned as the natural gateway of northern Tanzania and Uganda’s eastern borderlands.

What is emerging is not a two-port system but, slowly, a multi-port map of East Africa.

Tanzania’s playbook, and Kenya’s response

Read as a five-point plan, Tanzania’s strategy begins with infrastructure, with the SGR as the centrepiece.

The next phases, Makutupora, Tabora, Isaka and Mwanza, are designed to sweep the entire central and lake hinterland into Dar es Salaam’s rail catchment.

On pricing, the revised Sea-Port Tariff in February 2026 and the 30-day free-storage window for Uganda and DRC transit cargo explicitly target Mombasa’s most persistent complaints.

Customer service has improved with the opening of a new Dar es Salaam cargo-customer liaison office in Kigali, and One-Stop Border Post arrangements along the Central Corridor have cut crossing times from days to hours.

Diplomatic alignment prioritises Rwanda, Burundi, the DRC and Zambia.

And the narrative has shifted: Dar es Salaam is now positioned as the natural geographic gateway for southern and central Africa, not the “alternative” to Mombasa.

Kenya’s response is differently calibrated.

The resumption of the Naivasha–Kisumu–Malaba SGR construction in mid-2026 ends a long period of uncertainty and signals to Kampala that the Northern Corridor remains committed to rail-backed growth.

“It was never a railway to nowhere. It has always been a railway to prosperity and transformation,” said President William Ruto.

Mombasa has rolled out faster digital clearance, targeted evacuation of long-dwelling containers and the use of Lamu to absorb overflow.

Diplomatically, Kenya has invested heavily in its relationships with Uganda and South Sudan, and helped revive the Northern Corridor Transit and Transport Coordination Authority to coordinate infrastructure upgrades.

The LAPSSET programme remains the long game: a second Kenyan trade corridor, which, if completed, would fundamentally alter Kenya’s exposure to Mombasa-centred traffic.

Is this a zero-sum contest?

Both ports are growing. Mombasa hit 45.45 million tonnes in 2025; Dar es Salaam crossed 27.7 million tonnes in the same fiscal period and is targeting 54.6 million tonnes by 2030/31.

At the regional level, the two corridors are handling more cargo between them than at any time in East Africa’s history.

Their markets partially overlap but are genuinely different. Mombasa’s gravitational pull is strongest for Uganda, South Sudan, the eastern DRC and part of Rwanda, anchored by its decades-old logistics ecosystem.

Dar es Salaam is strongest for Rwanda, Burundi, the southern and central DRC, Zambia and Malawi, anchored by shorter geography and an increasingly credible rail story.

Cargo diversion at the margin is real, and that is where the political heat is, but the dominant story is complementary growth rather than outright displacement.

The competition carries real downside risks.

Kenya and Tanzania are spending tens of billions of dollars on SGR lines, port expansions, special economic zones, and hinterland roads, much of it on limited-scope projects whose economics depend critically on achieving minimum throughput volumes to be viable.

If the two countries over-build on the assumption that one corridor will triumph, regional taxpayers may end up paying for two parallel systems where one could have done the job more cheaply.

Lamu is the cautionary tale: conceived for a level of demand that has yet to emerge, the tower cranes are as symbolic of the wider region’s infrastructure ambitions as they are of the limits of those ambitions.

However, intensified competition could encourage the use of non-tariff barriers and the discriminatory application of rules of origin, undermining the very regional integration the ports are meant to serve.

The East African Community has been the institutional home of the corridor story for decades.

Its One-Stop Border Posts along the major crossing points, from Malaba and Busia to Rusumo and Mutukula, have reportedly saved the region more than 63 million US dollars a year in clearance costs and cut average border-crossing times from days to hours.

Whether competition between Mombasa and Dar es Salaam makes the region better off depends on how that competition is managed.

Olivier de Noray, Director General of Ports and Terminals at Africa Global Logistics, warned:

“The observation of Kenyans is, I think, that if they do nothing, they will be overtaken.”

If it translates into faster clearance, lower tariffs, more investment in inland transport and more competitive freight rates, consumers in landlocked countries should see lower import costs and faster delivery times.

If it drifts into tit-for-tat tariff moves, the EAC’s competition authority and the corridor authorities will need to act as referees.

The OSBP experience offers a model: a regionally agreed framework that lifts the floor on service quality regardless of which corridor is used.

Who ultimately wins

If there is one country that will determine whether Dar es Salaam surpasses Mombasa in importance, it is the DRC.

With a population approaching 110 million and a geography that places it on the Central Corridor’s doorstep, the DRC is the largest swing market in East African trade.

Uganda, too, is the corridor system’s fulcrum; as long as Kampala’s trade continues to favour Mombasa, Dar es Salaam’s ceiling on regional share is structurally limited.