Mombasa port falls behind Durban port in African trade.

Transporting goods by sea remains the most common way to trade globally, but in Africa cargo spends an abnormally long time in ports before it is moved inland, presenting a serious obstacle to the successful integration of sub-Saharan economies in worldwide trade networks. A World Bank study, titled ‘Why does cargo spend weeks in sub-Saharan African ports?’ shows.

Lessons from six countries, found the average cargo waiting time to be 20 days and that more than half of the time needed to transport cargo from ports to ­hinterland cities in landlocked countries in
sub-Saharan Africa is wasted because of the time it spent in ports.

The average cargo "dwell time" in Durban (South Africa) is four days, which is on a par with ports in East Asia and Europe. It is followed by Mombasa (Kenya) at 11 days, and Douala (Cameroon) at 19 days.
The African Development Bank's definition of dwell time is the time cargo remains in a terminal's in-transit storage areas while awaiting shipment for export or onward transportation by road or rail for import.
Dwell time is one indicator of a port's efficiency: the higher the dwell time, the lower the efficiency. And longer dwell times have an adverse effect on economic growth.

Long transport times reduce trade
A 2012 working paper produced by the National Bureau of Economic Research, titled Time as a trade barrier, concluded that longer transport times dramatically reduce trade and estimates that each day in transit is worth 0.6% to 2% of the value of the goods.
Long transit delays also significantly lower the probability that a country will successfully export its goods.

Africa's estimated infrastructure deficit of $48-billion a year is often singled out as the culprit for hampering trade in and around the continent, but reasons for bottlenecks are far more complex and a lot more challenging to resolve.

Shantayanan Devarajan, the World Bank's chief economist for the Africa region, says that long dwell times are in the interest of certain players in the system and that dealing with the proximate cause of the problem, such as the apparent lack of berths in African ports, is unlikely to trigger a solution.
"Specifically, importers use the ports to store their goods; in Douala [Cameroon], for instance, storage in the port is the cheapest option for up to 22 days," Devarajan wrote in the foreword of the World Bank study .

"Customs brokers, meanwhile, have little incentive to move the goods because they can pass on the costs of delay to the importers. Worse still, when the domestic market is a monopoly, the downstream producer has an incentive to keep the cargo dwell times long as a way of deterring entry of other producers."

Discretionary behaviours
The evidence in the study shows that discretionary behaviours increase system inefficiencies and raise total logistics costs.
"In most ports in sub-Saharan Africa, the interests of controlling agencies, port authorities, private terminal operators, logistics operators (freight forwarders) and large shippers collude at the expense of consumers," the report said.

Surveys demonstrate that low logistics skills and cash constraints explain why most importers have no incentive to reduce cargo dwell time as, in most cases, doing so would increase their input costs.
"Moreover, some terminal operators generate large revenues from storage, and customs brokers do not necessarily fight to reduce dwell time because time inefficiency is charged to the importer and eventually to the consumer."

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