Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia Are Building Fast American Freeways - Best Africa Roads

Africa is building American style highways to tame traffic jams choking the streets of its growing cities. Among the countries building Africa's best roads are Kenya, Ethiopia and Uganda. We take a road trip to check out the freeway action.

Among the biggest projects is the Nairobi Expressway, which is rising across the Kenyan capital and aims to speed past the jam and cut travel time to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. We take a close look at this challenging construction project, which will change Nairobi.

Uganda recently received a big boost from the African Development Bank for its planned Kampala to Jinja expressway. This project seeks to cut travel time between these cities by 65 percent. Ethiopia also has embraced expressways to move its economy even faster.

While Chinese companies dominate road building across Africa, other countries are competing for a piece of the African road building opportunity, including South Korea and even America. One of these planned expressways in East Africa involves a legendary American company.

African strategists seek to connect this vast continent with a network of highways running east to west, north to south. America took decades to build a similar highway network linking what is basically a country the size of a continent.

While the road builders may not be American, the inspiration for Africa's fast new roads is the USA.

What do you think of Africa's highway ambitions? How should African cities be linked by roads? Or by air or rail? Drop a comment below.

For more on African road and highway projects, see the African Development Bank's site at afdb.org

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