By Millicent Kgeledi,

6 March – Journey to Ndola…

A 5-hour journey from Zambia’s Capital, Lusaka to Ndola awaits us this morning...

Zambia’s weather as usual, is unpredictable but the team’s in a jovial mood, I suppose everyone’s looking forward to the road trip to Kasumbalesa, one of the busiest Border Posts in Africa. Kasumbalesa is a border post where five major ports dovetail- the port of Durban, Dar es Salaam, Beira and Walvis Bay from SADC and the port of Mombasa from East Africa.

On the team we have colleagues from the African Union Development Agency-NEPAD, COMESA, CCTTFA representatives from the Governments of Botswana, DRC, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

Kasumbalesa is a One Stop Border Post (OSBP) between Zambia and DRC and is one of the busiest borders with commercial vehicles cleared at the border travelling from and destined to South Africa, Tanzania, Namibia, Mozambique and other SADC countries. Due to high volumes of traffic, in 2011 major renovations were undertaken to improve the border infrastructure to enhance traffic flow and movements of people.

“What’s an OSBP?” I ask my colleague Kisa Nkhoma on our way to Ndola.

Kisa is tasked with the role of managing the MoveAfrica Initiative. Under this initiative, the Traffic Light System project has been set up to assess the performance of cross-border logistics. It is for this reason that we are undertaking this mission to evaluate the performance of the Kasumbalesa border post, identify bottle necks and recommend actions to be undertaken.

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