Property – Infrastructure & Megaprojects · Editorial

By Moakanyi Magazine · China-in-Africa · June 2026

In 2015 Addis Ababa opened the first light-rail system in sub-Saharan Africa, two electric lines threading 31.6 kilometres across a fast-growing capital. It was a real milestone, carrying tens of thousands of riders a day at fares the poor could afford. It was also, within a few years, a system in visible decline – trains thinning, stations ageing, and Chinese contractors returning to keep it from collapse. The milestone and the maintenance crisis are the same project, viewed at different points on the same timeline.

The build: a concessional loan and a quick opening

The Addis Ababa Light Rail was built by China Railway Group at a final cost of about US$475 million, around 85 per cent of it covered by a concessional loan from China's Exim Bank. The first line opened in September 2015 and the second weeks later, giving the city two routes and 39 stations far ahead of most African capitals. For a continent where urban transport often means informal minibuses, an electric metro was a statement of intent.

The speed of delivery was the headline at the time, and it was real: a working metro stood up in a few years on borrowed money, where many cities spend a decade in planning. But speed of construction said nothing about durability of operation, and the financing covered the steel, not the decades of running it would demand. The loan built the system; it did not endow its upkeep, and that distinction would define everything that came next.

The opening was a genuine first – and firsts attract more attention than upkeep.

The economics: cheap fares, expensive to run

The system's affordability was also its financial trap. Early assessments reported daily income of roughly 400,000 birr – about US$14,000 – and annual earnings near US$11 million against operating costs that ran far higher, reported in some early figures at well over US$150 million. Fare revenue could not cover the cost of running an electric railway exposed to power cuts and a weakening birr, and deferred maintenance compounded year on year.

By the early 2020s the consequences were physical. Reporting described a tram system in danger of collapse, with rolling stock out of service and Chinese firms stepping back in to halt the slide, including a maintenance package put at around US$60 million. The metro had not been over-built; it had been under-funded for the years that follow a launch, and the gap between a fare poor riders could pay and the hard-currency cost of spare parts simply widened until something gave. A devaluing birr made every imported component dearer in local terms, turning a maintenance problem into a foreign-exchange one.

A fare set for riders, not for cost recovery, defers a bill that always comes due.

The lesson: the launch is the easy part

Addis Ababa's light rail is a fair test of what Chinese-financed urban transit delivers and what it does not. It delivers a working system quickly, at concessional rates, ahead of regional peers. It does not, on its own, deliver the recurrent budgets, hard-currency spare-parts supply chains and local engineering capacity that keep a metro running through its second decade – and those were the parts the loan was never designed to fund.

That the original contractor had to return to rescue the system is its own quiet verdict. It points to a dependency that outlasts construction: when the spare parts, the rolling stock and the technical know-how all originate abroad, a host city cannot simply maintain the asset on its own once the builders leave. Building local capacity alongside the line, not after it, is the unlearned lesson.

For the many African cities now weighing light rail, the takeaway is unglamorous: budget the operating decades before you celebrate the opening day, and treat local maintenance capacity as part of the project, not an afterthought. The hardware can be financed in a single loan. The upkeep cannot, and pretending otherwise is how a milestone becomes a rescue case.

None of this cancels the achievement. A city of several million gained 31.6 kilometres of electric mass transit at fares ordinary riders could meet, years ahead of wealthier capitals, and the system still moves people. The fair verdict is mixed rather than damning: a genuine first that arrived under-provisioned for its own second decade, and that survives now on the strength of an external rescue rather than a domestic plan.

Any city can open a metro with the right loan; keeping it open is the real engineering.

Sources: Wikipedia – Addis Ababa Light Rail, Semafor – Addis light rail US$60m problem, Global Construction Review – China steps in