Given its limited access to the sea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) strongly relies on its neighbors, including South Africa and Tanzania, to export its copper. Angola may soon become a new shipping route, due to the slowness when passing through Tanzania and SA.
Last week, the first shipment of Congolese copper left the port of Lobito in Angola for the United States. Trafigura, part of the consortium managing the Lobito rail corridor and port, announced the departure on August 22. The copper cathodes were shipped from Kolwezi and arrived at Lobito six days later, confirming the Lobito corridor as the quickest export route for DRC copper. In contrast, reaching ports in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, or Durban, South Africa, takes 14 and 25 days, respectively.
Before the recent shipment to the US, the DRC had sent some of its copper to Europe and the Far East, through the Lobito corridor. The European Union and the United States are financially backing the corridor's development to challenge China's dominance in copper supplies from the Central African Copperbelt, which mainly includes the DRC and Zambia. There are also plans to extend the Lobito corridor into Zambia.
• Côte d’Ivoire signs $156.8M farm deal with Italy’s BF Group• 10,000-hectare project aims to c...
• Safaricom’s M-PESA Fintech 2.0 upgrade lifts capacity to 6,000 transactions per second, scalable t...
M-KOPA sold 1.3M smartphones in 2025, reaching 6.4M devices sold since 2020. 42% of buyers got th...
Masiyiwa’s Cassava to invest $720m in 5 AI factories, bringing 15k GPUs for Africa’s data sov...
The EU pledged €359.4m to build Côte d’Ivoire’s 400-kV Dorsale Est line, boosting capacity an...
• United Airlines will increase Marrakech–New York flights to four per week in Oct.• The route may reach daily service during year-end peak demand.•...
• Congo’s parliament is expected to approve a new gas code in October 2025.• The law aims to attract investment with new fiscal and regulatory measures.•...
• AfDB chief Sidi Ould Tah met BOAD president Serge Ekué in Abidjan on Aug. 30.• Talks focused on joint efforts to attract private investment for major...
Morocco’s tourism revenue reached $9.6 bln in the first eight months of 2025, up 14%. The country welcomed 13.5 mln visitors in the same...
The city of Kilwa, located on the southeastern coast of Tanzania, represents one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of the Indian Ocean....
• JICA cancels Africa exchange program after viral immigration rumors• Misreport claimed Japan would grant visas to Nigerians in Kisarazu• Elon Musk’s...