The North-South Corridor, referred to as Africa’s flagship trade and logistics corridor, has received international recognition by winning two awards at the recent Global Infrastructure Leadership Forum held in New York.

It won the prestigious Strategic Project of the Year award and the Job Creation Project of the Year.

TradeMark SA’s John Donovan attended the Forum and collected both awards on behalf of the COMESA-EAC-SADC Tripartite.  He also delivered a 30 minute presentation on the North-South Corridor to the international audience of contracting specialists and project financiers.

Donovan said:  “The award testifies to the importance of the North-South Corridor in driving regional integration in the 26 countries in the Tripartite with their combined population of 600 million. It also testifies to the teamwork that has driven this corridor project. The presentation was very well received by the delegates. A good number of them had one-on-one interviews with me to learn more about the complexities and opportunities that the project involved”.

The awards honour the leaders driving the next generation’s most transformative global infrastructure projects in five categories – strategic, finance, engineering, job creation, and green/new infrastructure. The North-South Corridor competed against projects from Colombia, Georgia, Slovakia and Russia.

The North-South corridor is a crucial infrastructure project in ongoing regional and pan-African policy processes promoting economic growth, infrastructure development and trade facilitation across the sub-region.  The US $11bn corridor consists of more than 10 000 kilometres of road across eight countries in southern and eastern countries.  The North-South Corridor links the port of Durban to the Copperbelt in DR Congo and Zambia. In addition, spurs link the port of Dar es Salaam with the Copperbelt and link Durban to Malawi.