The port of Lomé is a top transshipment platform for goods transiting to Sahel countries
Monday, 07 September 2020 16:26 
(Togo First) - Besides striving to have one of Africa’s top container ports, Lomé’s port, according to recent figures, is also improving its performances relating to transit with Sahel countries.
The port of Lomé currently handles more than 2.85 million tons of goods destined to these countries. This is almost three times the volume it did in 2013 - 1.26 million tons or 60% of the infrastructure’s overall transit volumes then.
The improvement was driven mostly by activities with Burkina Faso, the leading partner of the port of Lomé. Indeed, at the end of 2019, goods transiting to Togo’s northern neighbor represented 77.7% of the port’s transit volumes (against less than 40% seven years earlier).
Moreover, after moving up and down between 2013 and 2016, transit traffic with Niger (whose main partner port is the port of Cotonou, Benin) has been rising steadily since 2017. For Mali, from 2016, more than 100,000 tons of goods have been transiting through Lomé every year (despite most of its goods passing through Dakar, Conakry, and Abidjan).
Lomé, transshipment port
The port of Lomé is above all a hub in terms of transshipping. Every year for the past four years, more than a million TEU containers are handled by the port before being sent to other ports across the region. This makes Lomé’s port the first container port in the Gulf of Guinea.
Last year, the platform recorded container traffic of 1,500,611 TEU containers and 76% of this volume was due for transshipment (compared to 34% in 2013).
According to a recent publication of Lloyd’s List, the port of Lomé is the second-best container port in sub-Saharan Africa. It comes after that of Durban in South Africa.
Fiacre E. Kakpo
