Kenya is seeking funding to press ahead with the extension of the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) project to Uganda and South Sudan.
Moneyweb reports that President William Ruto visited the United Arab Emirates in mid-January, to sign a trade pact deepening ties with the Middle Eastern country and to secure an additional $1.5 billion loan to help bridge Kenya’s budget-financing gap.
Ruto said that as part of the SGR plan ‘we have agreed to conduct a feasibility study over the extension of the SGR due to its capacity to foster regional integration and promote trade’.
For its part, Uganda signed a US$3 billion deal in October with Turkey’s Yapi Merkezi Holding to fund its part of the SGR project, linking Kampala to the Kenyan border town of Malaba. Another project to build a rail line linking landlocked Uganda to Kenya’s port of Mombasa was scrapped in 2023 after funding talks with China failed to deliver.
