Dry Ports Development: A Pivot Strategy to Enhance Sustainable Transit Traffic via West African Corridors

Abstract

West Africa like many other regions in Africa, is enjoying a period of rapid growth in the past decade and within this period, its international trade has grown significantly. However, the region lacks sufficient dry ports, which can enhance a sustainable transportation of transit cargoes via the various corridors as well as relieving pressures on the seaports. The essence of this paper is to select an optimum location for the development of a dry port in West Africa based on specific factors relevant the research objective. The center of gravity location model was applied at the landside in order to ascertain the transportation cost of goods from selected coastal ports to the hinterland markets as well selecting an optimum location for the development of a dry port with a cost minimization objective. A simple forecast of demand throughput for West African landlocked countries was also applied using time series regression analysis in order to access the traffic growth rate as well as the associated capacity constraints that the ports might experience in the nearest future. Finally, SWOT analysis was used to analyze the endogenous and exogenous factors, which are deemed crucial to the development of dry port in Cote d‟Ivoire.