The African Development Bank Group, working with ECOWAS and regional financial partners, has completed a field mission across Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria as part of efforts to secure funding for the long-planned Abidjan–Lagos Highway.
The 1,028-kilometre corridor, when built, is expected to connect five of West Africa’s most active economies through a six-lane transnational motorway. The mission, which ran from April 9 to April 24, focused on moving the project from planning into an investment phase by engaging governments, finance ministries, and private sector partners on how the road will actually be funded and delivered.
The delegation held talks with ministers responsible for infrastructure and finance across the corridor states, including Ghana’s Roads and Highways Ministry and the Ministry of Finance, as well as counterparts in Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria. The discussions were not only political but technical, covering design issues, environmental concerns, land acquisition challenges, and the financing gap that still needs to be filled before construction can begin at scale.
At the centre of the talks is a basic problem West Africa knows well: ambition is not the issue, but execution and funding often are. While feasibility studies have already been completed and $25 million has been provided by the African Development Bank for early preparation work, the main construction phase still depends on large-scale financing commitments from multiple sources.
The project is being structured as a single regional asset under a Corridor Treaty signed by all five countries. A new body, the Abidjan–Lagos Corridor Management Authority, has been created to oversee the road once built, including construction standards, operations, and long-term maintenance.
Officials involved in the mission described the corridor as a key link for regional trade, especially under the African Continental Free Trade Area, where movement of goods across borders is expected to increase if transport costs and delays are reduced.
Still, the scale of what is being attempted is significant. Building and coordinating a single highway across five sovereign states means dealing with different regulations, fiscal pressures, land systems, and political timelines.
For now, the project remains in transition, fully designed, politically agreed, but still searching for the financial structure that will turn it into physical infrastructure on the ground.
