A decade ago, when Ethiopia’s late leader Meles Zenawi was planning 5,000km of standard gauge railway, the landlocked country was granted a $2.5bn loan by China Eximbank. That loan was tied to the construction of an 800km railway east-west between Addis Ababa, the capital, and the port city of neighbouring Djibouti. It would be built by Chinese engineers and use Chinese locomotives.
Then, in 2013, Ethiopia’s government entered into an engineering and procurement contract for another line. This one was intended to run about the same distance south to north, between the central town of Awash and Mekelle, capital of the now war-torn Tigray region. The contractor was Turkish construction group Yapi Merkezi, which helped broker $1.1bn of funding from Turkey’s Eximbank, Credit Suisse and European export credit agencies.
And the two lines now offer a chance to compare major pieces of infrastructure by Chinese and non-Chinese companies in the same African country.