As Presidents Kagame and Suluhu Push to Fast-Track Stalled Project, Businesses Say the Isaka-Kigali Line Will Halve Freight Costs and Unlock New Markets
KIGALI, Rwanda, May 8 — Rwandan importers, exporters, and small-scale traders have thrown their weight behind a renewed push by Presidents Paul Kagame and Samia Suluhu Hassan of Tanzania to accelerate the long-delayed Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) between the two countries, calling it a lifeline that would slash transport expenses, unclog logistics bottlenecks, and reshape trade across the region.
The 521-kilometer Isaka-Kigali railway, with an estimated price tag of $2.5 billion, has been under discussion since at least 2007 but has yet to break ground. It was thrust back into the spotlight on May 3, when Kagame visited Dar es Salaam for bilateral talks with Suluhu. A joint communiqué afterward confirmed that the two leaders had directed their ministers to “expedite the necessary technical processes” for the rail link, part of a broader effort to deepen economic integration between the two East African neighbors.
For Rwanda, a landlocked nation that relies overwhelmingly on two main corridors to the sea Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and Mombasa in Kenya — the railway promises a dramatic improvement in the cost and reliability of moving goods. Transporting a 40-foot container between Kigali and Dar es Salaam currently costs about $5,000 by road, a figure that earlier feasibility studies suggest the SGR could halve.
“The biggest advantage is that trains carry large volumes at once, which lowers costs,” said Robert Bafakurera, a Kigali-based businessman. “If cargo can move directly from Dar es Salaam to Kigali without requiring trucks midway, traders would save significantly.”
Bafakurera noted that Rwandan import regulations do not generally require containers to be offloaded before reaching their final destination, meaning goods could travel seamlessly on rail wagons. Even small-scale traders, he said, stand to gain by sharing container space a practice that would become far more economical with a reliable rail timetable.
Dar es Salaam’s Delays Push Traders to Consider Mombasa
The pressure to fix the corridor is already visible on the ground. More than 600 trucks now cross the Rusumo border post between Rwanda and Tanzania every day, double the volume recorded three years ago. In the fourth quarter of 2023 alone, Rwanda imported goods worth $228.26 million from Tanzania, making it the country’s second-largest source of imports after China. But the heavy reliance on trucks has exposed traders to punishing delays and unpredictable storage fees at the Dar es Salaam port.
Francine Havugimana, a businesswoman who imports consumer goods, described a system where cargo can be held up for days, racking up charges that erode profits. “When cargo is delayed, traders are charged for the number of days it stays there storage fees, container charges. If you had already signed supply agreements with clients specifying delivery dates, these delays can make you miss deadlines even when it is not your fault,” she said.
Those frustrations, Havugimana noted, have already prompted some Rwandan businesses to explore rerouting their cargo through Mombasa in Kenya. She believes a functioning railway would halt and reverse that trend, restoring Dar es Salaam as the natural gateway for Rwandan trade.
Exporters are equally enthusiastic. Grace Mbabazi, who exports honey to markets abroad, said the train would be “the only affordable way” for producers like her to get goods to the port reliably. “Renting trucks is very expensive and exhausting,” she said. “For us, the SGR isn’t just about convenience it is about survival in a competitive export market.”
Caveats: Last-Mile Gaps and Mountainous Terrain
Despite the widespread optimism, transport experts caution that the railway’s benefits will not materialize automatically. Ivan Muhizi, an urban mobility specialist, warned that simply laying track will not be enough to guarantee lower costs for the smallest traders. Without a redesigned freight distribution network — including urban consolidation centers near commercial hubs like Kimironko and Nyabugogo, scheduled freight movements, and micro-delivery systems for the last mile the savings could be swallowed up by the chaos of city logistics.
“A train brings a container to Kigali, but what happens next? If a small trader has to hire a truck to get her goods from the rail terminal to her shop, and that segment is inefficient, she may not feel the price difference,” Muhizi said.
Kevin Kamanda, a transportation engineering student who has closely followed the project, underscored that the most urgent priority remains determining the exact route through Rwanda’s mountainous terrain. “Route confirmation is the prerequisite for everything else. You can’t design bridges, tunnels, or stations until you’ve settled the alignment,” he said. For the railway to fulfill ambitious plans linking it to Bugesera International Airport and creating a cargo-to-air transshipment hub, Kamanda said three things are needed: a dedicated rail spur into the airport, an intermodal transfer terminal, and direct airside access to the cargo apron.
He also stressed that institutional coordination would need to match the physical infrastructure, pointing to the Rusumo One Stop Border Post which cut clearance times dramatically as a model that could be scaled into a single clearance window covering the entire Dar es Salaam–Kigali journey.
A Long Wait for Steel and Stone
Tanzania’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mahmoud Thabit Kombo, told reporters in July 2025 during the 16th Joint Permanent Commission in Kigali that technical matters of feasibility and route planning were “under active consideration at the ministerial level” in his country. Nearly a year later, Friday’s presidential push has reignited hopes that the Isaka-Kigali line might finally move from decades of study to actual construction.
For the traders who daily navigate a road corridor where a single breakdown can mean a missed contract and mounting penalty fees, the promise of a train whistle in the Rwandan hills cannot come soon enough. As Havugimana put it, “We have waited long enough. The faster they can make this happen, the sooner we can stop counting the days our cargo sits idle — and start counting the money we save.”
